You want your email to reach its intended audience right?
Good email deliverability means your email campaigns are making into inboxes instead of ending up in spam folders. Once your campaign hits the recipients inbox you can compel the largest number of subscribers possible to open your message rather then delete it. Good open rates lead to higher click-through rates and better overall ROI.

But what does it take to maximize deliverability?

Here are a few basic tips to help grow your delivery potential.

1. Become a Trusted sender: Encourage the recipient to add your from address to their address book, trusted sender list or approved sender list.
2. Analyse and Manage Bounces: Analyse your bounces, correct obvious typos (e.g. ".con" instead of ".com") and unsubscribe any hard/permanent bounces.
3. Respect any Unsubscribe requests: Monitor your "reply to" address, some recipients may not use the unsubscribe link, but instead choose to reply to your email requesting they be unsubscribed.
4. Understand Email SPAM filters: Check your subject line, from line, and email, and avoid using language and techniques that might look like SPAM.
5. Avoid the following:  SPAM-like words e.g. Free or guarantee. Red only Text, overuse of capital letters and Excessive Punctuation or symbols e.g. !!!, ???, $$$.
   

If you can master these few easy tips, your well on the way to maximizing your deliverability and getting into your recipients inbox.
   
Want to LEARN MORE about Improving Deliverability? Why not check out our free whitepapers at our Training Portal:
http://ezymsgconnect.com/whitepapers/

One of the biggest trends of recent years is the switch many people are making from computers to mobile devices for internet access. Most people still use computers, but they now increasingly rely on their phones and tablets to access the web when they’re on the run. You must keep this in mind with your email marketing efforts.

There are a few things you can do to make your emails mobile friendly.

• Keep subject lines short, on mobile devices, long subject lines can get cut off. Try use 40 characters or less.
  

• Consider things like design, layout and font size, you want to make sure that mobile users can see your emails as well as computer users. Keep your Email width less than 600 pixels, and don't use font sizes under 13px. 
  

• Make links and buttons easier to click on, make sure buttons and links in your emails are large enough for people to press with their fingers. Avoid grouping links together, nothing worse than clicking the wrong link. Remember that mobile users aren’t using a mouse.

• Avoid Flash, keeping your emails in HTML format will ensure that mobile users can access all of the content.

Mobile open rates continue to grow and your recipients are constantly checking emails on the go. Emails not optimized for mobile devices give your recipients a bad experience with your brand which can lead to unsubscribers and not opened emails.

The most important thing to remember about images in email is that they won’t be visible by default for many subscribers.  If you start your design with this in mind, it forces you to keep things simple and ensure no important content is suppressed by image blocking. Therefore it’s good practice to avoid Image-Based Emails.  

Image-based emails are often practiced as a simple, easy method of delivering a pretty design irrespective of the rendering circus among the array of common email-clients. When we consider image blocking as part of the rendering equation, it’s easy to see how an image-based email could be completely destroyed with a single preference. Furthermore, this doesn’t take into consideration file sizes for mobile/dial-up recipients, accessibility for those visually impaired or the HTML-to-text ratio that spam filters apply.

Below are some other essentials to remember when using images in HTML email:

Avoid spacer images
While the combination of spacer images and nested tables was popular on the web ten years ago, image blocking in many email clients has ruled it out as a reliable technique today. Most clients replace images with an empty placeholder in the same dimensions, others strip the image altogether. Given image blocking is on by default in most email clients, this can lead to a poor first impression for many of your subscribers. Stick to fixed cell widths to keep your formatting in place with or without images.

Always include the dimensions of your image
If you forget to set the dimensions for each image, a number of clients will invent their own sizes when images are blocked and break your layout. Also, ensure that any images are correctly sized before adding them to your email. Some email clients will ignore the dimensions specified in code and rely on the true dimensions of your image.

Provide fallback colors for background images
Outlook 2007 has no support for background images (aside from this hack to get full page background images working). If you want to use a background image in your design, always provide a background color the email client can fall back on. This solves both the image blocking and Outlook 2007 problem simultaneously.

Don’t forget alt text
Lack of standards support means email clients have long destroyed the chances of a semantic and accessible HTML email. Even still, providing alt text is important from an image blocking perspective. Even with images suppressed by default, many email clients will display the provided alt text instead. Just remember that some email clients like Outlook 2007, Outlook.com and Apple Mail don’t support alt text at all when images are blocked.

In summary, we should be giving serious consideration to image-blocking and what we can do about it. It’s natural and reasonable why people disable them, but with the right approach we can improve the experience for our subscribers.

In our first Power Tip we look at ways to Highlight your call-to-action:
Keep in mind the purpose of your emails. It could be introducing your new products, visiting your website or subscribing to your newsletter, That’s your call-to-action. Whatever your purpose is, remember to have clear and obvious call-to-actions as part of your email content.

Here's a couple of quick tips to help maximize the power of your call-to-action:

1. The call-to-action has to be visible, obviously. You could highlight your call-to-action by adjusting the fonts, its size and color. You could also use capitalization's, italics and underlines to create call-to-actions that grab attention.
2. You may want to incorporate buttons and images. Buttons are difficult to miss even at a quick glance. You should exercise caution, however; you don't want to litter your email with buttons.
   
3. Be more Descriptive, try not to use a basic "click here" button. Use words that make it clear what clicking the button will do, buttons like "Read more on the blog" or "Order yours now", will usually work better.

Without a compelling and clear call-to-action, your work to maximize deliverability, write great subject lines, and develop amazing creative content won't matter.

Start evaluating your calls-to-action today. Test different designs, link placements, wording, and text/image orchestration to keep your email campaigns performing as they should.