Measure Twice, Cut Once

Share with your network!
...or the case of the missing white space character. The phrase "measure twice, cut once" is one usually applied to the building trade but the meaning behind it can and should be applied to the world of email newsletters too. In the case of the latter, the sorts of things you are probably "measuring" are that:
  • there are no spelling errors
  • the content is grammatically correct
  • any links to images are correct and the images display
  • any links to web pages are correct and the pages display
to name but a few. I recently had cause to deal with an issue with a sender where the lack of a white space character caused a large percentage of their recent newsletters to be marked as spammy. The sender, who shall remain nameless, is a well known global brand but we'll say their domain is example.com for the purpose of this post. At first glance, there wasn't anything too untoward about the mails. They consisted of both a text/plain and text/html part; the latter showing a nicely formatted mail with all the usual things one would expect to see (View web version, Unsubscribe, Share This, etc). The text/plain part didn't look too bad either, containing some text and lots of links to match what was in the HTML part. However, right at the bottom, in their text disclaimer about shipping they had this:
...Not transferable and not redeemable for cash or for credit towards previous purchases. Valid only onExample.com
It is quite minor but the missing space after 'on' turns example.com into something quite different...to a content filtering program. Now, not all content filters will work the same way but identifiers like URLs, domains, and any IP addresses they might resolve to are all things that can be keyed off and used to determine if a mail is spam or not. Sites like URIBL, for instance, track the reputation of such things, allowing their data to be used by others. So the reputation of your domain example.com might be great but if you prepend that with an 'on', then content filters will treat that as a completely different domain. This might not appear to be the biggest problem your mail encounters whilst trying to get its way to your recipients inboxes but what if this new domain onexample.com happened to match a domain belonging to another company? What if that company and that domain had a, let's say, suspect reputation? Well that's when you start to find that your deliverability rates drop and maybe you start to scratch your head and wonder why. Its probably also worth pointing out that in the case I was dealing with it appears that the onexample.com company was selling counterfeit versions of the sender's own goods, amongst other well known brands. What does this issue teach us? Check your work. Then check it again. The modern email newsletter is quite complex and made up of a number of components and even the smallest thing could be contributing to low inbox placement or open rates.