I want to discuss a topic that is important to nearly every company today. If you use the Internet at all for communications, SPAM is a topic that affects you--from one end or the other. As an email recipient, SPAM can greatly reduce your productivity, if you don't have an effective SPAM filter or service. If your SPAM filtering is too effective, however, it can cause a critical document to be delayed reaching you--or even lost in the most extreme case. So even as a recipient, email deliverability is an important issue to most business people.



On the other side, almost all companies today use email to deliver something to their clients and prospects: receipt of orders, regular newsletters, product update information, special sales offers, company new, responses to customer support inquiries, etc. For those on the sending side of email, deliverability has become a CRITICAL issue in the last few years. If time isn't spent on optimizing delivery, the usefulness of your email communications will be greatly reduced.

On this note, I wanted to let you know about a couple of great resources on this topic that I have come across. The first item is a free, quick and dirty tool available on the Internet: SPAMCHECK, from a company called SiteSell. This site allows you to either enter your email message into a box on the site, or alternately send a test email to their diagnostic address. You will instantly be returned with a list of attributes of your message that raises the risk of being caught in a SPAM filter, and therefore not delivered as intended to the recipient. It's very easy to use, for even the most novice of emailers, and returns practical, actionable advice on how to make your email message more deliverable. I highly recommend it, and use it myself. It can be useful as the only deliverability test for low-key email usage, or as a "first-pass" for a more sophisticated, high cost campaign.

The other resource you should be aware of is Return Path, a well known email marketing company. Return Path is particularly well known for their email delivery services. They have a comprehensive set of tools that are widely used by email marketers. The Return Path site contains a large amount of great material for the education of email marketers. I highly recommend that you visit their site and sign up for one of their newsletters, which contain a wealth of information on this dynamic topic.

Just remember, all the time you spent on your value proposition, marketing message and offers are of no use if your email doesn't reach the target audience! Let me know if these resources are helpful.