1. Enable the Confirmed Opt-In feature. Contacts who confirm their subscription are interested in your business and will most likely view your emails. Sending email to contacts that are not opening/viewing your email affects your delivery rate as well. Send a reconfirm email to older contacts/lists to help you reconnect to contacts and allow contacts no longer interested to opt out. This way the contacts you do email will be interested in what you have to say or sell, improving your delivery rate. Reconfirm email details can be found in the Confirmed Opt-In link above.
2. Check Spam Results, on Campaigns/Step 7, to ensure the email isn't filtered to a junk, bulk or spam folder. Your score should be low or medium. If the score is high, correct the content before sending your email. This will help prevent bad email from being sent.
3. Only email users who have subscribed/opted in to decrease unsubscribes, complaints and undeliverable addresses.
4. Avoid excessive punctuation and CAPS in your emails, especially in the subject line.
5. Create a clear subject line - include what your email is about (character limit 100).
6. Avoid using a non-generic email address, if possible, for the 'From Name' and 'Reply-To', located under Campaigns/Step 3. Examples of generic email addresses are yahoo.com, gmail.com, etc.
7. Keep email content relevant. Sending irrelevant content to subscribed users may still get your email marked as junk/spam, by the recipient. Create segments, on Campaigns/Step 4, to target the correct group of people for your content.
8. Always include a plain text version of your email.
9. Include more text than images in your email. Avoid emails that consist of images only.
10. Ask subscribers to add you to their address book (also known as whitelisting). NCR Customer Connect automatically adds a whitelist message to the header & footer of all emails, but it doesn't hurt to verbally ask customers to add your FROM address to their address book after receiving an emailed store receipt or newsletter. Your email will always be delivered to their inbox if your address is whitelisted.
11. Use reputable and consistent IP addresses and domain names. NCR Customer Connect handles this for you.
12. Test, test, test all emails. Sign up for several free accounts and send yourself test emails to review how different email clients handle/display your email. Some free accounts you can sign up for are gmail, yahoo, netzero & aol. If you have an Outlook email account, it would be wise to send test emails to it too. Outlook renders emails differently from other email clients. People complain most about bad email format in Outlook.
Learn more about how to correct formatting issues seen in Outlook.
If NCR Customer Connect users create good content and maintain a clean email list, email is more likely to reach the recipient's inbox.
Read more about email delivery and how it works.