This document explains how you can maximize delivery and acceptance of your email marketing messages while using Lead Liaison. Start by reviewing the checklist in Section 1 and make sure each item is addressed. Each of the following Sections describes the items in the checklist in more detail. By reading this document you will learn three cornerstones of email marketing; 1) how to get the best email deliverability, 2) how to manage subscribers and messages for maximum acceptance and 3) how to grow your subscriber base.

"The Goal of Email Marketing and Lead Nurturing is Quality, Not Quantity"
-- Lead Liaison

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
1 Email Deliverability and Acceptance Checklist
1.1 Things for you to do:
1.2 Things to do with Lead Liaison's support:
2 How to Get the Best Email Deliverability
2.1 Don't Send Emails through a Shared IP Address
2.2 Warm up your IP Address
2.3 Use Caution with Old Database Contacts
2.4 Use Authentication
2.4.1 DomainKeys/DKIM
2.4.2 Sender ID/SPF
2.4.3 List of ISPs and the Authentication Methods they use
2.5 Consider Using a Different Related Domain to Send Emails
2.6 Use a 3^rd Party ESP like Lead Liaison
2.7 Manage your Reputation with the ISPs
2.7.1 Handling Email Bounces
2.7.2 Resolve Spam Complaints
2.7.3 Check Blacklist Records
2.7.4 Monitor Feedback Loops
2.8 Follow the CAN-SPAM Act Requirements
3 How to Manage Subscribers and Messages for Maximum Acceptance
3.1 Have a Simple and Prominent Unsubscribe Link
3.2 Use "Safely Unsubscribe"
3.3 Create the Right Email Marketing Template
3.3.1 Use your Company Colors and Logo
3.3.2 Don't use Spam like Words in your Email
3.3.3 Send Messages in Text Format with HTML Format
3.3.4 Limit the Size of Emails
3.3.5 Limit the Use of Images in Emails
3.4 Add a Link to your Privacy Policy Web Page in your Emails
3.5 Go Slow at First
3.6 Have an Active Email Address for Replies
3.7 Mark the Source of your Contacts
3.8 Check and Re-Check Uploaded Lists
4 How to Grow your Subscriber Base
4.1 Create Great Content
4.2 Get People's Permission
4.3 Use Many Landing Pages and Web Forms
4.4 Keep Web Form Fields Simple
4.5 Show a Picture of your Content
4.6 Use Auto Responders to Cross Promote
4.7 Provide Social Sharing options
5 References

Email Deliverability and Acceptance Checklist

Following this checklist will ensure your email messages successfully reach your recipients and will increase the likelihood of your messages being accepted, not marked as spam/junk, by your recipients.

Things for you to do:

Things to do with Lead Liaison's support:

How to Get the Best Email Deliverability

Don't Send Emails through a Shared IP Address

Deliverability and reputation problems can occur if you are using a shared IP address to send out your emails while other senders use the same IP address. If the other senders emails get marked as spam or the shared IP address gets blacklisted your IP will be blacklisted and/or your emails will land in the junk folder. Many ESPs automatically use shared IP addresses across many clients.

Lead Liaison assigns a dedicated IP address to each customer. Trials are run using a shared IP address pool. Even in the pool, there are multiple IP addresses to prevent one from going down and affecting other trials.

Warm up your IP Address

If you're just starting out with Lead Liaison or your IP address has changed you will need to warm up your IP address to develop a reputation with the ISPs. If you suddenly send out 30,000 emails in one day from a new IP your messages will be limited or purposely throttled by ISPs. If you're in the thousands of emails to begin with you might avoid scrutiny. However, if bounces, spam complaints, or spam trap hits represent a high percentage of your emails sent you'll damage your reputation right out of the box. Make sure you initial sends are to very clean lists.

Use Caution with Old Database Contacts

Try not to send emails to invalid or very old contacts in your database. It's best to run some type of database cleansing tool on your database first. If you send a single message to your entire database and include these dormant contacts you could have a high percentage of bounces. Additionally, old email addresses could be spam traps. Bounces and spam traps will send a notification to the ISP and damage your reputation. The best practice is to send frequent emails to small amounts of old contacts, vs. sending to your entire database or all old contacts, and monitor results. If you're getting lots of bounces phase out this effort. Conduct this "experiment" only after establishing a good reputation.

Use Authentication

As discussed, establishing a good reputation is vital for email deliverability. To protect your reputation several methods have been developed by various consortiums. These methods verify your email messages come from an authorized server and not from a nefarious source. The solutions are DomainKeys/DKIM and Sender ID/SPF records. Each authentication method is described below.

DomainKeys/DKIM

Created by Yahoo!, DomainKeys/DKIM is an authentication scheme that signs messages based on the "from" header and a DNS (Domain Name Server) record maintained by your DNS servers. For example, if your company's domain name is registered with GoDaddy.com there's a good chance your DNS is also hosted with GoDaddy.com. To keep it simple, a DNS is a set of rules and parameters for your domain name. Since your DNS is managed by you and hosted inside a secure area (such as GoDaddy.com) it's a secure way to prove the "from" address originated from the correct mail servers.
DomainKeys/DKIM validates emails using two security keys. The keys encrypt messages before delivery and validate the message at delivery time. DKIM and DomainKeys are very similar; however, DKIM was created by several companies to enhance DomainKeys. Today, major ISPs such as Google (@gmail.com) and Yahoo! (@yahoo.com) use DKIM.
Benefits of using DomainKeys/DKIM: