Following up with customers after they purchase is a critical part of the sales process. This communication helps foster trust and loyalty from people who have already purchased from you.
Most email clients have a way for users to “whitelist” a sender so that messages from that sender aren’t filtered to the junk folder. I investigated major email programs to find out what subscribers should do, step by step, to ensure they see your messages.
I’ve read a lot of posts lately about converting potential buyers who are on your site, put items into their shopping cart, and then before checking out, leave your site. People are close to purchasing your product, but for some reason are changing their minds at the last minute and abandoning their carts.
While ISPs still use IP blacklists to try to keep spam off of their systems,
they increasingly use other tactics to keep their users’ inboxes clear of
spam while still delivering requested messages. One comonly used
method is content filtering.
I took a support call recently where the customer was concerned about using Verified Opt-In with her subscribers. She remarked at one point:
“My subscribers aren’t web-savvy, and they don’t know what double opt-in means.”
She brings up a good point: language that is understood among one group of people (in this example, senders of opt-in email) may not be understood by another group (such as your subscribers).When telling your subscribers that they need to click a link in the verification message, your wording will affect your verification rate.
Often times when working with customers on their message campaigns, I notice they are including only HTML versions of their messages to their subscribers, with no plain text version. I politely bite my lip while I work with them on whatever issue they’ve called in for, then in an attempt to be as helpful as I can, I point a few things out to them about this…
Ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to subscriber inboxes is an increasingly difficult battle in the age of spam filtering. Open and click thru response rates can be dramatically affected by as much as 20-30% due to incorrect spam filter classification.