As a good email marketer you take care about creating your own mailing list by collecting subscribers on your website or blog. You make sure that your signup form is clearly visible to the readers and that your whole opt-in process works like a charm.

Your primary objective is to collect the email addresses of people who are interested in receiving your emails. You will be then sending your e-newsletters, promotional emails, news, offers, etc. to your subscribers.

But did you think about generating some profits and even sales from the signup process itself? This is what many email marketers overlook when setting up their opt-in program.

Here are a few tips you can take advantage of when building your email list:

As the Subject line is one of the factors that make the reader either open or delete the message, we’re always wondering about the best way to write the Subject line. In one of my latest articles I shared several tips on how to write the Subject line to increase the email open rate.

However, I don’t think we’ll ever find a definite answer what is good and what is bad with regards to the Subject line. This is because one thing may work well for one sender and it may not work for another sender in a different kind of email message. This applies to the personalization of the Subject lines too.

Using an SMTP server to send emails is faster and more reliable because the emails sent through the SMTP server have more chances to be delivered into the Inbox. If your ISP SMTP server is able to handle many messages at a time and does not impose strict email sending restrictions, you can use your ISP SMTP settings in G-Lock EasyMail.

Email marketers understand that the unsubscribe process is as much important as the opt-in process. The unsubscribe link included into each email is a must have for reputable email senders.

However, some people still prefer clicking on “Spam” button if they don’t want to receive emails from you anymore. Maybe they don’t trust the sender’s unsubscribe process and see a spam complaint as a more trustworthy way to opt-out, or maybe they are just too lazy to search for the unsubscribe link in your email, or maybe for any other reason but you are likely to receive a number of spam complaints after each email campaign. And that’s normal. You should be worried only if the number of spam complaints exceeds the allowable threshold set by the ISP. That’s why a great idea is to sign up for ISP feedback loops if you are not signed up yet and monitor your spam complaints at a regular basis.

List hygiene plays a role in the delivery race. It is important to maintain a clean mailing list and remove bounced/undeliverable emails because a lot of ISP mail servers have been known to block a sender’s email domain for repeated sending messages to email addresses from a non-existing domain.

Most spammers don’t have actual email addresses. Spammers are known to use a software that takes random email addresses and they do not care about bounced or undelivered emails. Hence, ISP assumes that the sender is trying to spam and may block or blacklist his email domain. It will be quite problematic to resolve the matter (block/blacklist) and the only thing to do is to register a new email domain or use another email domain to send emails out.

We’ve already talked about best email marketing practices and tips for a good, healthy HTML email newsletter. These concepts are good practices and worth to be followed by email marketers.

But we all are in different environments; we have different online businesses and different subscribers’ databases. What works for us may not work for you and vice versa. Thus, the best tip you should follow is test your email marketing campaigns to find out what works best for your own subscribers and what doesn’t work at all. 

Today I’d like to share with you 4 weird email marketing concepts which oppose common practices but may work for you under certain circumstances:

The Internet teems with practical advices, tips and tricks on email marketing: how to create an email newsletter, build an email list, get better response rate and so on. Such information is absolutely important and should be studied by email marketers, in particular, by those one who are just starting their online business. By the way, you can find much useful information on email marketing in the articles on my blog. Do you want to know how to make your emails easier and friendlier to your subscribers? Go on and read my 5 Real Steps to Fast, Easy and Relevant Email

But in this article I won’t tell about any 1, 2, 3 … best email marketing practices and strategies. What I am going to focus on is a psychological aspect of the Internet marketing.

Blacklists are the most challenging issue for email marketers. You may follow best email marketing practices compliant with CAN-SPAM law and still end up in a blacklist. The worst thing is that you will not even know that you are blacklisted until you take some steps to investigate the issue.

So, in this article we’ll talk about the causes why you may get into a blacklist, examine the ways how you can determine if you’ve been blacklisted or not, and give several tips what to do if you got blacklisted.

Before you send an email newsletter to the contacts stored in your Yahoo address book, you need to export the contacts from your Yahoo account to a common CSV file and import them into your email marketing software.

Your sender reputation with ISPs is the key factor which determines what will happen to your email after you click “Send”. Your reputation is built on your email sending activity, and it’s much easier to spoil it rather than restore your good name.

Although many email marketers underestimate it, sender reputation is a big concern. A bad reputation is often the reason for the emails being filtered and not reaching the recipients.

When it comes to email delivery, one of the serious challenges email marketers have to deal with is delivering emails to AOL users. Email messages and the whole sending process must be optimized and tailored to meet specific AOL features and requirements.

Similarly to AOL, Hotmail also uses several criteria to decide whether to deliver an email or block it. If your list contains a certain % of Hotmail email addresses, you’ll want to be aware of some particularities of how Hotmail treats emails. If you’ve already been unsuccessful with delivering an email newsletter to your Hotmail subscribers, you can optimize your email delivery system to meet Hotmail requirements and deliver your emails into the Inbox instead of the Hotmail Junk email folder.

Before you can send an email newsletter to the contacts stored in your Gmail address book, you need to export the contacts from your Gmail account to a common CSV file first and import them into your email marketing software.

To send opt-in email campaigns, you need two things:

• List of opt-in subscribers, and
• Bulk email software

Do you have any experience of e-mail marketing? So, how was it? Well, I don’t want to make myself out to be an e-mail marketing expert and teach you how to improve your e-mail campaigns. I just want to share with you some of my personal observations on how you can ruin your e-mail marketing campaign completely.