As a matter of course, we test emails against the outlook junk filter to maximise the possibility of them getting to the recipients inbox, and a couple of projects this week have hightlighted again the importance of this process, and in considering every angle when designing emails to maximise deliverability. The normal focus is the on structure & content of the main email, but in these two cases, these areas did not highlight any major issues, but the mail was still failing the Outlook junk test. Further testing revealed the issues:
- In one, the subject line was causing the failure, and the simple step of removing a ? from the end of the subject line solved the problem.
- In the second, it was the name of the page that the email clicked through to that was causing the issue, changing the name of the page from response.php to index.php again solved the problem.
In our opinion deliverability is one of the key issues when considering email marketing, especially when working with highly tartgeted B2B lists which may only be a few huindred or a few thousand recipients, because yoiu can be sure, if it ends up in the Junk box, your recipient will not see your carefully crafted message! If you would like to talk to us about how to improve the deliverability of your emails, then, get in touch.
