Businesses that sell their products or services to other businesses could have it a bit more difficult when it comes to getting messages delivered. Email Service Providers (ESP's) like VerticalResponse maintain great relationships with the ISP's to ensure consumer email gets delivered. However, individual businesses can add other hurdles for your messages to get past.
Breaking It Up Can Help
Some businesses, usually larger ones, might begin to get suspicious about email getting through their doors when they see multiple messages that contain the same content. They're likely to think it's bulk marketing email and perhaps block it or use some sort of filtering mechanism. One way to test this is to segment your list into a smaller campaign and see if sending smaller chunks of email gets you a better response.
Getting Rid of "Dear"
Another big impact to B2B delivery is starting your email with “Dear” as a salutation. You might try forgoing your salutation altogether because while they are polite, they aren’t really necessary in email. The biggest problem with using the word “Dear” is that it can be flagged specifically in SpamAssassin and other filters as well and businesses may be using that tool.
Calm It Down
Be tempered in your content design. Avoid using font sizes that are too big for your headlines. Be conservative and only bump a headline up a font size or two, and highlight it with bold. Don’t use unusual background or font colors. Filters also flag this fancy formatting as a trait associated with bulk marketing email.
Clean Code
Make sure the HTML coding is clean since poorly formatted HTML could result in emails being bulk foldered or blocked. Never use MS Word to design your email because when you copy and paste from MS Word there are additional characters that get automatically inserted. As a result it's flagged as sloppy code and can get filtered.
Don’t code your emails using Cascading Style Sheets or CSS. MS Outlook 2007 does not render CSS and neither will the newer version of Outlook 2010. Your email will look messy and unprofessional not to mention get filtered.
Active Links
Make sure your links are active since broken or improperly entered links could cause filtering. Also, make sure your links don’t end with .php – this has been shown to cause message filtering. Just designate a new link for that page that doesn’t have that .php and you will be fine.
A Healthy Balance
Balance Text and Images. Spam filters look for image-only email messages. If you embed your text and graphics into one single image, you risk your message going straight to the junk folder. And since most email clients suppress images by default – if your email is one big image it will like open as a blank email with no call to action. Even worse, the first thing your recipients might see is your unsubscribe message. Ouch.
If you intend to send a text-only message, design it as a text only message from the start. If you design your message as text in an HTML document, this could also cause issues since filters will see the email unevenly weighted between html content and text content causing potential filtering.
Even if you're not building your email for business to business, these are all good ideas for consumer driven emails as well.
Related Post from The VR Marketing Blog: Email Delivery: Authentication, Reputation and Feedback Loops, What It All Means.
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