Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Jay, I just used the CampaignMonitor tool for grins, even though I was pretty sure it was the same thing I use now with a different front-end. It's still the same ReturnPath toolset underneath, and it's still giving me the same "false-negative" for Outlook 2007.

Bah!

Thank you, though.

Hi, Karen -

Thanks for the effort. I do appreciate it.

These tools, however, are more about validating your HTML for the Web (ensuring that you're using clean, compliant code) as opposed to helping HTML email not come across as junk-mail (which is often more about the content and not the format of the HTML code itself).

In fact, most HTML email is anything but current-standards compliant. "Good" HTML email includes lots of tables, limited CSS, if any, it's all very old school...it's enough to make a real modern-day HTML Ninja crazy!

I have a feeling -- not sure, just a feeling -- that Outlook has recently updated its 2007 junk-mail filter, because the ReturnPath tool should be all over this. I know I just downloaded a number of MS updates today, and maybe that was one of them.

In any event, I slogged it out, went through my HTML email line by line, and figured out how to get the email through.

Thanks for helping me play detective, though! I really do appreciate the time.

-Paul

So please share with us in more detail how you "figured" it out. I think we would all love to hear about it.

Thanks

It was quite a grind.

The email in question is long, and it includes a direct-response, paid offer with a 50% savings. (The people who will get the email have registered with the company and set up a free account, but they've never used the paid service; this is an effort to convert some of those people to paying customers.)

So, as you can imagine, the email has more than a few words that could be "offfensive" to junk-mail filters.

I basically stripped my HTML email down to nothing and then added paragraphs or sections one at a time. If the email survived my test cycle, then I added another section. If it did not survive, I made educated guesses as to the offensive content and made other choices.

It took over 100 tests to get it right (about 5-6 hours of time), but I finally got a version that plays nice with spam filters and is still pretty darn solid as far as copy and calls to action.

I am still trying to find out how come my ReturnPath tools were of no help whatsoever with this. Seems like the Outlook 2007 rules should be among the more important and worthy of immediate update.