As everything in the Internet, email marketing is constantly changing. A never-ending flow of spam entails the appearance of new strict anti-spam technologies and filters. It makes more and more difficult for legitimate opt-in emails to survive and forces e-mail marketers to debug their e-mail programs.

As email marketers we are continuously searching, testing and experimenting in quest of new ways to improve our e-mail performance. And this is reasonable because only using trial and error method we can discover the email tactics that work best for us.

In one of the recent articles I wrote how you could improve your email open rate by using creative Subject lines. Now I would like to cover the topic from another perspective and tell about the format of the email message.

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:

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.

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:

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.

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