Honor Unsubscribes Immediately, Monitor Your Reputation and Monitor Your Partners' Reputations
Honor unsubscribes immediately: It’s hard to imagine but there are still some marketers out there who are reluctant to remove a few names from their lists. Each and every email must contain an easy-to-use unsubscribe method – not a microscopic link buried at the bottom of the message that is easily overlooked, but an actual visible link that removes subscribers from your lists immediately. If the link is overlooked, the subscriber will simply report your next unwanted message as spam. Worse, if subscribers click on the unsubscribe link only to be taken to a website that is hard to navigate, it will be difficult for them to remove themselves. Similarly, if a message is sent stating that they will continue to receive emails for several weeks during the unsubscribe process, you are inviting people to complain about your emails and giving them the ammo they need to report your email as spam.
Monitor your reputation: There are several proactive steps you can take to monitor your reputation and many of the services are available at no cost. For example, you can check blacklists for both your IP and your URLs for free at Sender Score, MxToolBox.com, and Spamhaus, and there are several vendors, such as Return Path, Habeas, and Pivotal Veracity, that offer reputation monitoring services for a fee (see the Accreditation section).
Monitor your partners’ reputations: Every teenager learns that their reputation isn’t solely dependent on their actions. Bad behavior from their friends can lead to negative opinions and damaged reputations. The same is true for email. Even if you follow all of the rules and best practices your reputation may still suffer damage if your business partners do not take the same precautions. Be sure to check the reputation of a company before you partner with them and make sure it is following best practices so you are not associated with a company that does not follow the rules.
Even if you follow all of the rules, some of your subscribers will still mistakenly report your emails as spam, which is why it is so important to monitor and remove bounces, inactives, and complainers from your lists. For more information on reputation, read Listrak’s white paper “How Reputation Impacts Deliverability.”