Spamming is increasing clogging our inbox. It takes careful consideration when setting up your email campaign. Most internet marketers, have no idea what there delivery rates are and, less than half use tracking tools. Still others were basing there delivery rates on guessing, prospect/customer feedback or testing with their own email address.

There are other issues that afflict email marketers such as anti-spam compliance, single and double opt-in methods, text vs. html formats, frequency of sending emails, blacklisting/whitelisting, maintaining relationships with ISP and content.

To increase your success as an email marketer and not get tagged as a spammer, here are 10 things to remember:

1) Enhance the start of the relationship by focusing special attention at the beginning because email performance usually declines two months after responders opt-in. Engage your new subscribers immediately in an organized program that include a welcome letter, a copy of the latest newsletter or promotion and emails offering a set of best-newsletter articles or an email-exclusive offer for new subscribers. It is important to manage the subscriber's expectation from the start by adequately explaining the email program's value proposition, frequency, type of content and privacy policies.

2) Segmentation and personalization are probably the most underutilized keys to email marketing. Your email is competing with many others in your subscriber's inbox. Personalized subject lines, offers, articles, products showcased and follow up emails based on recipient activity, are clear winners. It is critical that you begin this process even if it is only personalizing the content of the subject line.

3) Many email marketers spend plenty of time building relationships with ISPs, and putting things in place so their emails get to the inbox however in vain, because most final gateway such as Hotmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Gmail, etc have filters stopping unknown senders. To avoid this, make sure your prospect adds you to their whitelist.

4) for a successful email marketing campaign, get and confirm permission from your subscribers. Double opt-in and following up with a confirmation email is the exception most email providers are accepting as the standard.

5) As the inbox gets more crowded with spam, your users are looking for relevant content. The age of email blasting is over. Send valuable, informational content. Avoid promotional words and phases, multiple exclamation points, all capitol letters and text often used by spammers. Nothing can trigger subscriber dissatisfaction like continued emails that do not meet subscriber's expectations in terms of content and frequency.

6) Handling unsubscribes promptly is an important internet marketer's responsibility not to be overlooked. You should also set a process to enable your subscribers to update their preferences and email address without having to jump through a series of hoops.

7) Always test your email marketing campaign. A strategy that worked six months ago, may not work today. You must continuously tweak your format, design, copy style, calls to action, subject lines segmentation content, days/times sent, etc. Start with simple A/B split tests and repeat a few times to verify your results.

Focus on what really matters when setting up your email campaign. When you use these best practices within your email marketing program, both you and your subscribers will win.

Copyright (c) 2008 Kerry Johnson