In celebration of the new month, I'm pleased to bring you a guest blogger submission by friend, colleague and email marketing guru, Jeanne Jennings (www.jeannejennings.com). For anyone who is charged with managing communictions efforts using email, the topic below sheds new light on how to minimize bounces and maximize reach using email.
Maximizing Deliverability for Email Marketing
Sending a press release via email is great – but knowing that it was delivered to the inbox of your intended recipients is even better.
If you’re sending email from your own servers or using an email service provider (ESP), there are some free tools you can use to gauge your “deliverability,” which is a fancy word for the likelihood that your messages are making it to the inbox. Knowledge is power; if you aren’t checking your deliverability on a regular basis, you might have a problem and not even know it.
To check your deliverability, you’ll need the IP address of the server sending your email (best) or the domain name that appears in your sender address. The latter only works if you’re using your own domain (“gaia.com,” “jeannejennings.com”), not if you’re using a generic domain (“aol.com,” “verizon.net,” “gmail.com”). Even if you have your own domain, it’s still good to check both that and your IP address.
If you’re sending from your own server, ask your IT team for the IP address. If not, you can still get it with just a little investigative work.
Your IP address appears in the email message header of every email you send. To find it, include yourself on the send list and wait for the email to reach your inbox.
If you’re using Outlook, you can then right click on the message in your inbox (not when it’s open full screen) and choose “Options” from the drop down menu. In the “Internet Headers” section of the Message Options box (at the bottom), scroll until you see “Received: from…” then scan for a ten digit number in brackets that looks something like this “[72.167.180.17]” – that’s the IP address of the server your email was sent from. If you’re using a different email client to read email, click on “help” to find out how to view your Internet headers and find your IP address.
If it looks like you might have a problem, contact your ESP or your in-house IT team and ask them to look into it. They can contact the owners of the blacklists that are blocking your mail and find out what about your email messages (or the email messages of others sending from your server) is causing the server to be tagged as one sending spam.
If it’s something that’s easily fixed or if they can show that it’s a “false positive” (meaning that your mail is mistakenly being identified as spam), you can clear your good name and get your messages back on track to the inbox.
To learn more about two free email deliverability tools you can check out today, read my recent column on ClickZ.
More on Jeanne Jennings
Jeanne Jennings is a leading authority and independent consultant with over 15 years of experience in the e-mail and online realm. She specializes in all aspects of e-mail marketing and publishing, from strategy through design and metrics analysis. Jeanne works with medium- to enterprise-sized organizations and is expert at helping her clients become more effective and more profitable online. She is the author of "The Email Marketing Kit: The Ultimate Email Marketer’s Bible" (SitePoint, 2007) and publisher of "The Jennings Report," a free e-mail newsletter for online marketing professionals. Visit her online at JeanneJennings.com.
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