One of the best ways to ensure mail is delivered to a recipients inbox is to encourage the recipient to add the senders from: address to their address book. In cases where an ISP might otherwise bulk folder the email, they will instead put the email into the inbox.
Senders are changing their practices to get recipients to add from addresses to address books. There are a number of companies reminding users to add addresses on the webpage at the time of signup. Most emails have recommendations in each email. Recently, there have been multiple reports of companies who send specific email campaigns to encourage recipients to whitelist the sender.
Cool Email Idea: Customized Whitelisting Instructions from ReturnPath.
How & Why You Need to be Added to Your Recipient’s Address Book from VerticalResponse.
In addition to the direct benefit to the recipient that whitelists the individual sender, there are some hints that ISPs are looking at individual whitelisting as part of their internal sender reputation scoring.
Getting whitelisted by endusers
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What I’ve never yet seen is any figures indicating whether users actually do add marketers from addresses to their addressbooks or whitelists.
I’m concerned the emperor may be hanging around in his underwear on this one.
That “cool idea” from Travelocity is something that I’ve been doing as an email marketer for the last 4 years. Come on…this would have been a “cool idea” back in 2003.
Hey Bruce, I think if you work in email support and deliverability guidance for long enough, you learn that every old idea is new. The whole point of this industry seems to be teaching really obvious things to people who don’t know it already. It’s stuff people outside of our industry just don’t know about. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had to explain something to somebody that I know I’ve been doing (and recommending) for years. So I personally wouldn’t fault ReturnPath (or Laura) for highlighting it.
Hi Laura –
Thanks for passing on the blog link. I wanted to see if you had seen this one yet? http://blog.verticalresponse.com/verticalresponse_blog/2008/09/coach-will-miss.html Not quite as good of an idea.
Jenna Jantsch
VerticalResponse