VerticalResponse provides tools and resources to help you create your emails and get them delivered to your subscribers inboxes. And, we pesonally approve every email sent out through our system. Yep, you heard that right; we look at all emails sent out to ensure compliance with both the CAN SPAM law and our own policies.

After approving millions of emails in our system, we’ve seen the same common errors that cause emails to be declined. The good news is they’re easy to avoid!

Here are 5 Common Email Mistakes to Avoid:

1. Postal Address – The number one reason for email declines is lack of a full postal address. The CAN SPAM law requires a valid postal address  for the email sender. This is added to a footer at the bottom of the email, along with the unsubscribe information. We automatically pull the From Address from the Profile in your VR account (click Account in the blue navigation bar at the top to access this), so complete it in your Profile to avoid delays later.

2. Subject/From – The Subject Line and From Address are similar and both can be declined about as often. There are rules governed by the CAN SPAM law so it’s important that you set them up correctly. Your From label has to be the sender of your email, and again we pull this from your Profile. The subject line has to be related to your email content and shouldn’t be misleading in any way. “Free Sushi!” is a great subject line as long as your email has something to do with free sushi.

3. Extra Unsubscribes – Your recipients can get confused if you include extra unsubscribe options in your email. VerticalResponse processes all unsubscribes for you and updates your account with this information. We include this information in the reporting for all your sent emails, and it’s also marked in the list section of your account. You can access this information any time you need to, either by checking it in your account or by downloading the data for use outside of VR.

4. Personalization – One of many great features in a VerticalResponse account is the ability to personalize your emails.

But you need to make sure the field you are trying to merge in the email is also present in the lists you are mailing to. We won’t send out an email with an improperly formatted personalization field, so double check that you have it all set up correctly. Wondering how?  First, check the merge fields in your tests, then on the launch page our system will let you know if there are any bad merge fields for you to edit.

5. The Use of “RE:”, “FWD:”, and “ADV:” Within a Subject Line – This ties in with popular decline number 2 because this is a misleading subject line. These acronyms are used when responding to an email that was delivered to your inbox. Since any email being sent through our system is a new email, and not a reply or forward of a previous email, this is deceptive or misleading to your recipients and against the CAN SPAM law.

VerticalResponse has policies in place to ensure that all email sent through our system won’t damage our mailing reputation. Most of the emails are great, but every now and then there is one that goes against our policies and we need to decline it. When creating your emails keep in mind that we don’t allow make money from home, pornography, pharmaceuticals of any kind or multilevel marketing emails. In addition, we don’t allow the use of purchased or rented email lists. And, we don’t allow phishing schemes or anything that is blatant spam.

There they are! 5 common email mistakes to avoid. Most are easy to avoid by taking just a few minutes to accurately set up your VR account before you get started sending your emails.

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