- Research your e-newsletter service provider. This has implications for all of your e-touches. Make sure your service provider is on the whitelist (protected list) of personal e-mail service providers such as AOL, Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo — to name a few — so your messages will get through.
- Only send your e-newsletter to those who opt in. You can’t just add people’s names to an e-newsletter subscriber list. A double opt-in policy is even better and prevents spammers from registering for your e-newsletter. When people subscribe to your e-newsletter, send them an e-mail that includes a link that they must click on to confirm their subscriptions.
- Make it easy for e-newsletter recipients to unsubscribe or change their subscriber information. In our increasingly transitory world, folks are changing jobs and e-mail providers all the time, so you want to make it easy for your subscribers to manage their subscriptions.
- Once you’ve drafted and formatted your e-newsletter, run it through a spam filter. How many times do you use all caps? How many times do you include words such as “click” and “free”? These words are red alerts for spam filters. Use the spam filter test to see what can be corrected so what you deliver is as clean as it can be.
- Don’t send e-newsletters as attachments. Attachments are a burden for recipients to have to download and run through virus protection. Either send your e-newsletter within an e-mail format or send an e-mail with a link to the e-newsletter.
