httpremix.com
About the Author
Jonah Ellison lives in Seattle, Washington and works at a web firm developing websites and custom web applications for the
LAMP solution stack. He enjoys optimization, front-end usability, databases, clean code and clever solutions.
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- Write HTML like it’s 1999 – Email clients and web clients such as Gmail love to strip out CSS within
<style> tags. For this reason, use inline CSS. Also, using tables to build your newsletters is a safe idea as well, since the float property isn’t always supported. Outlook 2007 is extremely limited when rendering HTML–no background CSS images, no forms, no custom bullet images.
- Don’t use PHP’s
mail() function – This function opens and closes a connection to your mail server every time, which is extremely inefficient. It is possible to write your own bulk email sender in PHP, however! Use an SMTP class for more control and speed.
- In the “To” field, always have the user’s email address – The easiest way to have your email eaten by a spam filter is to not use the user’s actual email in the “To” field. Some like to send out more emails by placing multiple email addresses within the BCC header, but this will add spam points to the email.
- Set up an SPF TXT record for your domain name – This is another anti-spam filter technique to make sure your emails get through. If you look at the source headers of an email, you may see an entry that says
Received-SPF: neutral or Received-SPF: fail. It should only take 5 minutes to set this up and make it say “pass.” For example, my domain register allows me to add DNS TXT records, so for the host field I would type “httpremix.com.” and for the address field I would add "v=spf1 a mx -all" (quotes included for the TXT).
- Offer an “Unsubscribe” link – This may goes against trying to reach/retain as many customers as possible, but there’s nothing more frustrating than not being able to easily unsubscribe from a newsletter. It’s almost unethical not to include this. Just a small link at the bottom is needed. Ideally, the link would be have query parameters containing the user’s email address and an auth code, so all they have to do is click “confirm” on the webpage to unsubscribe instead of typing in their email address or logging in.
- Tell your users how often they will receive your newsletter – Monthly? Quarterly? Hopefully not weekly, unless it’s a pretty damn good newsletter. I’d recommend spacing it out to help reduce unsubscribes.
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