Last of the boring stuff!

Last week I wrote about why it makes sense to outsource your eMarketing to a professional company. But let’s say that you want to send out just a few emails and you don’t want to hire Travelwatch to do it. Here are a few tips to use so you don’t get stuck in spam filters. No guarantees… but its somewhere to start.

• Don’t try to be ‘tricksy’ and dump a bunch of names as a
   cc or a bcc. Your ISP will only deliver to the first 50 addresses. The remaining addresses will be ignored, sorry!
• Ensure the fonts are a standard size and try not to vary the size of fonts within the email.
• Colors in images don’t really matter, but the colors of text and links should be limited to black and blue.
• SUBJECT LINES: Subject lines should never sound like spam, so stay away from the hard sell and don’t fool recipients into opening
   the email by making the subject line sound like a reply or a personal message between friends. In particular, your subject line should stay away from: 
   o Swear words 
   o Sex 
   o Money 
   o Profit 
   o Special 
   o Girls 
   o Power 
   o Powerful 
   o Discount 
   o Over 18 
   o Your debt 
   o $ signs or other currency values 
   o Exclamation marks!
   o Click here (use visit the site or follow this link)
  o Go here 
  o A series of symbols or punctuation marks (#*!)
  o The excessive use of punctuation “…???”
   o Don’t use CAPS
   o Spelling errors
   o Grammatical errors

• And finally, consider Text only – I send my periodic touch emails on behalf of my travel agent customers as text and not HTML for a few reasons…I think it’s more professional, the graphics are wasted on people that receive their mail in text (approx 33%), it often makes a mess when sent to a blackberrys and there is a larger chance of getting stuck in email filters.
  That’s it! I’m happy to announce that Michelle and I are off to Huatulco for a week starting Friday. We can’t wait although
  Paco won’t be too happy to see us go!

behave,
Frank