Being CAN-SPAM compliant is only a small piece of the email marketing battle. The rest of it is deliverability, which is often based on things such as reputation (they keep track of the quality of your email over time), and whitelisting (putting you on their safe-list). The problem is, every major ISP out there today has their own such rules for accepting email (including bulk email), and classifying the rest as SPAM. Managing email for anywhere over a few hundred/thousand emails could easily equal a full time job, and of course the cost savings are much greater by outsourcing it to a company that specializes in email marketing with high deliverability.
- The official guide from the FTC
- In depth details, more of a step-by-step guide, on how to actually do it
- Microsoft (Hotmail) for example has their own guidelines here, some of which is pretty deep stuff for a lay-person; but as you may have guessed every major ISP (AOL, Yahoo, Earthlink, Gmail, etc..) will have their own set of guidelines. I tend to follow the big few, and hope to solve most deliverability problems with the smaller ones as well
The fact is, no matter how well you setup and maintain your email marketing, it will not all get through. For example, a little over a year ago, Lyris, one of the most expensive (not necessarily the best) email marketing services around, reported that overall, Gmail only accepted 79.1% of commercial email, with another 16% being delivered to the recipients spam box. See the full report here
The funny thing is, some companies out there claim a deliverability rate of 99%+. In an upcoming article, I will discuss the “best in class” email marketing companies out there, based on some detailed research, along with some inside information about these companies, and how not to get ripped off in the process. I will also go into more depth about various do-it-yourself options as well.
