VerticalResponse for AppExchange Blog

What You Need to Know About Email Delivery

Email Delivery sounds pretty simple:  you create an email, hit send, and then mighty wizards transport that email to your recipients through the use of hand-crafted cables and powerful laser beams.  What more is there to it than that?

As anyone who has sent more than a few pieces of commercial email knows, there is much more to it than that.  Nothing has a bigger impact on the bottom line of an email campaign than seeing that email delivered properly and then opened by as large a range of recipients as possible. 

This leads to two questions: what does VerticalResponse do to ensure email is delivered?  And what can you do to ensure your email is getting in front of as many recipients as possible? 

Let's take a look at both these questions.

What Does VerticalResponse do to Ensure Excellent Delivery?

We Use Authentication Protocols

As our CEO Janine Popick points out in the VR Marketing Blog today, we authenticate client email through the use of the four major authentication protocols: SPF (Sender Policy Framework), Sender-ID, DomainKeys and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail). With SPF and Sender-ID we have published records that state our mail domains are allowed to send email on behalf of our own IP Addresses. With DomainKeys and DKIM we sign each email with a key that the recipient server can then use to verify that we actually sent the email.

Authentication is an increasingly important component in email delivery, as email service providers can be confident that fully authenticated mail is not a scam or phishing scheme of some sort.  And VerticalResponse is one of the only providers in our space that utilizes all four of the major protocols for clients by default.

Be sure to take a look at Janine’s article if you want to learn more about authentication.

We Use Feedback Loops

We have feedback loops set-up with every single ISP that is known to offer one. This means if someone clicks Report Spam at Hotmail, that Hotmail trusts us to take action on the complaint. It also means that when someone clicks such a button at a participating an ISP (like Hotmail), VerticalResponse users don’t have to worry they’ll accidentally send mail to that person again as we automatically unsubscribe recipients who treat your mail in this way from your list.

Each ISP has their own threshold regarding how many complaints are allowed.  If you near this threshold or go over it, we will reach out and help you get to the root of the problem.

We Automate Bounce / Unsubscribe Processing

By automating this process (like many of our competitors), we ensure no users can abuse our IP Addresses by ignoring bounces and unsubscribes. This also helps us keep an excellent reputation.

Most service providers take their bounce messages very seriously and do not like it when someone continues to send email to addresses that provider says no longer exist.  Ignoring bounces can lead to mail not being delivered.  And, of course, ignoring unsubscribes is illegal according to the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act. 

We’re Anti-Spam

Everyone says they’re anti-spam, but we really, really mean it. We respond to and investigate every single complaint that comes in to our abuse desk, we quickly deal with clients who receive complaints (before they start causing delivery problems), and we even look over every email our clients launch to make sure nothing suspicious or fraudulent can make it out the door. This keeps complaints to a minimum, which is a big part of maintaining a strong reputation for our IP Addresses.  And a stronger reputation for us means a higher delivery rate for you, since your mail is being sent out through our IP Addresses.

What Can You Do To Help Ensure Excellent Delivery?

Keep Your List Healthy

Be sure everyone on your list has specifically requested info from or about your company. Also make sure you’re not mailing previously unsubscribed or bounced addresses (as I noted above). That went out of style a long time ago.

And remember that permission is not forever.  If someone gave you their business card at a tradeshow two years ago, it’s not a good idea to send them their first email today.  Don’t wait more than a month or so to mail a new contact, otherwise large segments of your list will begin to forget their interaction with your company.  This will lead to a lower open rate and cause some people to unwittingly report your email as spam.

Design With Delivery in Mind

Don’t just put a big image together in Illustrator and think you’re good to go. Make sure the email is easy to read (consider paragraph length and fonts), that images are being used only to enhance the HTML / text content (not as the sole content), and that the email is something that the subscriber would expect to receive based upon their sign-up.

If you use one our email creation tools - like the Canvas - then you’re probably just fine here.  However, if you write your own HTML you’ll need to make sure it’s validated and that you’re using code that is supported by all the various email clients out there (email clients are not as capable as web browsers when it comes to rendering HTML).  Check out my article from several months ago on HTML you should avoid.

Treat Subscribers with Respect

Don’t mail subscribers too often and clutter their inbox with mail they don’t want. Set expectations at the time of sign-up: “This is what we’re going to send you. And we’re going to send it to you this often.” Also try to maintain a relationship with the subscriber. Don’t mail them sporadically once or twice a year and expect them to take action with your emails. How often is too often? How sporadic is too sporadic? I would say twice a week to once every two months is a good range to keep in mind, depending on the type of messages you're sending out.

Have any thoughts or questions?  Let us know in the comments!

Richard Huffaker, Education & Training Manager

Secrets of the Email Canvas

VerticalResponse offers several applications for building an email within VR for AppExchange.  The most popular of these apps is the Email Canvas.  It is both a more powerful and more flexible editor than the other provided tools.

But more flexibility and power also means more complexity.  And while many parts of the Canvas are very straightforward (adding an image, creating a link, changing fonts), some functions are not as obvious.

Let’s take a look at some of these less obvious “secrets” of the Email Canvas tool.

Line Breaks:

The first time you type any text into the Canvas and hit the enter key, something that is perhaps unexpected happens - you get a double line break.  This is perfect if you wanted to start a new paragraph, and not so perfect if you were hoping to get a single line break.  So how do you get a single line break?  Hit Shift+Enter. 

Linking to an Email Address

Creating a link to a website is very straightforward: choose the text or image you want to link, click the link icon in the top row of the toolbar, and type the address for the link (http://www.mysite.com).  But what if you want to link to an email address instead of a web address?

The process is exactly the same as linking to a webpage, except you should type mailto:email@address.com in the link address box.  If I wanted to create a link to the email address for VerticalResponse support, I’d simply type mailto:support@verticalresponse.com.

Changing Background Colors:

Every available Canvas Layout has it’s own default background colors.  But what if you like a layout, but don’t particularly care for that layout’s provided background colors (or would like the colors to match your company’s branding)?   

Each section within a Canvas Layout is a Table Cell, and the background color of any particular cell can be easily changed.  All you need to do is click within that cell and then do one of two things:

1.  Right click and then choose Table Cell Properties from the menu that pops up.
2.  Choose Table Cell Properties from the Canvas Toolbar.  The Table Cell Properties button can be found in the second row of the toolbar (on the left-hand side).

Either of these options will open a dialog box where you can use a background color drop-down menu to select a different color.

Creating a Table of Contents

For a newsletter that includes several different sections (like the VerticalResponse newsletter), it’s a good idea to include a table of contents at the top of the newsletter so readers can click a link and go straight to the particular section they want to read.  How do you set this up?

1. Choose a part of your email that you'd like to link to. If you're writing a newsletter that has several different sections, the title to a section is a great spot.
2. Click the Anchor icon (top row, right side of the Designer's Toolbar). This will bring up a dialog box - name your anchor and click Insert
3. Now that you've "laid anchor", choose where you'd like to place a link to that anchor. This will usually be text or an image near the top of the email, since the main purpose of using an anchor link is to make it easy for readers to navigate to different parts of your message.
4. Click the Chain Link icon (it's right next to the Anchor icon) and use the drop down menu to select the name you gave your anchor earlier. Then click Insert.
5. Done! The new link will redirect you to the Anchor within your email. You can test this by going to the Quick Preview tab within the Canvas.

Changing the Default Font

If you’re not a fan of a layout’s default font, then you’ll probably want to change that font to one you like better.  The most obvious way to do that is to select text you want to change and then use the Font Family drop-down menu in the toolbar to select a different font.  But wouldn’t it be better to just change the default font for the entire email so that you get exactly the font you want as you type it?  Of course it would!

To change the default font, just go to Document Properties.  You can access Document Properties by clicking the fourth button from the right on the second row of the Canvas Toolbar.  From here you can use the text properties options to change the default Font Family and Font Size, as well as other properties like the color of your text and links.

Any other Canvas functionality you have questions about?  Let us know in the comments.

To learn more about using the Canvas, check out our How To Do Everything website or download our Step-by-Step Guide to Email Success. 

Richard Huffaker, Education & Training Manager