- Keep sender addresses as short as possible.
- Avoid continuous sending of messages to full or invalid mailboxes. You can do this by tweaking your bounce handling settings for each subscriber list.
- Minimize the use of these words and phrases in the subject line, message body, sender address, and reply-to address:
- Use of the word Free (although "free" tends to have more leeway than most other trigger words), $$, XXX, sex or !!! (any excessive punctuation)
- Subject contains "Double Your", "?", "For Only" or "Free Instant".
- TOO MANY CAPS IN THE SUBJECT LINE
- Email contains at least 70 percent blank lines
- The from field appears to not contain a real name, ends in numbers or contains the word friend.
- The reply-to field is empty
- The email claims not to be spam
- The email contains excessive images without much text
- Monitor new subscribers in your lists. Set suspicious "spamflag" addresses such as "abuse@" or "marketerspam@" as Inactive subscribers.
What are some good methods for avoiding spam filters?
Campaign Monitor “gets it”
"I know a good experience when I see it - Campaign Monitor 'gets it'. Your software is awesome - outstanding work. I hope to use it again soon!"
Mark Hurst, Good Experience
Gallery: Glasshouse Monthly Newsletter
We liked this christmas themed email sent last month by South Africa based Glasshouse Multimedia.
The email looks great, is consistent with their existing site and looks good even with images disabled. The newsletter even features some useful tips on designing emails. Now where did they get those from ;)
Sending monthly newsletters such as these to your clients is a great way to keep your services fresh in their minds and continually promote your portfolio. It can be time consuming, but in our experience it’s well worth it.
Designer: Nick Coyne | See the complete design
The truth about flash in email
The best Christmas emails of 2005
We mentioned a while back that we'd been seeing some great Christmas card designs being sent through Campaign Monitor and that we'd be awarding 10,000 free email credits to the designer who put together the best card before Christmas.
Since then, some of the coolest and most original Christmas emails we've ever seen have been delivered. These ranged from simple, low budget cards with a unique twist, to high budget flash masterpieces.
Perhaps the most encouraging trend among many of the cards was the options to donate to a charity. Because of the cost benefits of sending a card via email as opposed to creating, printing and delivering a traditional card, loads of companies were donating their Christmas marketing budgets to their charity of choice.
And the winner is...
Judging the best card concept was never going to be easy, but by Christmas Day there was one true stand-out. We just couldn't go past a unique e-card sent by San Francisco based Active Ingredients. While the email itself was relatively simple, it was the entire card experience that won us over. We've put together some screenshots below, but you can check out the entire email and web site here.
The actual email was a call to action for the recipient to check out the web-based card.
After an entertaining Christmas message, the recipient has the option of choosing which charity Active Ingredients should donate to on their behalf.
After selecting their charity of choice, the recipient adds their own details and confirms their donation.
Because of their amazing work, we've just topped up the Active Ingredients account with 10,000 email credits. Congratulations guys.
Honorable mentions
The range and quality was so high across so many other campaigns that we've decided to give away 5,000 email credits to the designers of the following cards.
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Shelton FlemingWe loved the great use of CSS in this email from Shelton Fleming. When you run your mouse over the text, key words are highlighted to deliver a hidden Christmas message. Simple and very original. |
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Olive DesignThis simple email from Olive design leads to a landing page with a holiday message and amazing quicktime movie for their clients through the Olive Winter Wonderland - look out for the ending. |
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T-bone ProductionsAnyone who goes to the trouble of wrapping a huge Christmas bow around their front door deserves a prize in my book. This combined with a clean, simple design made it a stand out. |
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n-taran-tara didn't muck around this Christmas. They created a truly addictive Flash based Christmas game to keep their recipients playing for hours. |
Congratulations again to the winners. I'd love to hear what you guys think of these designs, plus a mention of any other Christmas emails you thought stood out this season.
Gallery: WHEREmail Monthly Newsletter
This monthly newsletter sent by Canada's Where magazine caught our eye because it encompasses many of the design best practices we've been encouraging recently.
Not only does the email design still look fantastic with images disabled, it also promotes the contents of the email so it will be viewable in most preview panes. Most importantly, the newsletter content is also top notch.
Designer: Dan Seaman | See the complete design
Gallery: Connectpoint Focus
We loved this snappy monthly newsletter sent by Manchester based Connectpoint.
It breaks all the rules, but still manages to suck you into finding out more about each of the featured stories. As you can imagine, the click-through rate for each of their newsletters is very high.
My big suggestion would be to change the text titles into links as well. This will at the very least allow those recipients with images disabled to easily click each story to find out more.
Designer: Paul Normington | See the complete design