If you are a regular reader of The Thinking Inbox, you have often read about best practices in email marketing. We love to share our knowledge with you, and this week for “show and tell” I bring you an article all about best practices from Media Post’s Email Insider blog. Recently they reviewed email guidelines posted by major ISPs and found that many of the best practices that they (and Blue Sky Factory) have been preaching are in fact becoming requirements for deliverability. Providers such as Yahoo, Gmail, and Road Runner make recommendations for increased deliverability, but these suggestions should be considered mandatory if you hope to get your emails through.

Some of these best practices include:

• Use confirmed opt-in lists only. Publicaster has a great tool to create opt-in forms that send new subscribers directly into your database. For the cleanest list, use the double opt-in feature. To read more about opt-in forms, click here.
• Set up your Sender ID/SPF Record and Domain Keys. We have been encouraging our clients to complete this simple step to increase deliverability dramatically. In fact, we have written about authentication twice in the last few months. Find more info on that here and here.
• Keep your lists clean as a whistle! List hygiene is not something to put off for another day, and managing your bounces in Publicaster is easy. Read all about bounce management here.

I strongly encourage you to read more about these best practices and incorporate them into your email marketing strategy. Your deliverability depends on it!

We have made the opt-in form feature even better with a few more enhancements, which we are sure all Publicaster users will find useful.

Optin forms can now be edited as well as deleted:

As you can see in the screenshot above, the Manage Opt-in Forms page has a couple of familiar buttons for each opt-in form. They are for editing and deleting the opt-in forms. Now you will no longer have to create a new opt-in form in order to make a small change. You can simply click on the edit button to edit any given existing form. The edit feature uses the same easy to use wizard based approach that the “Opt-in Form Builder” uses. To reduce the clutter from the old/obsolete opt-in forms that you no longer use, we have introduced the delete option, which lets you delete the ones you no longer need. You will be asked to confirm whether you really want to delete it or not to avoid any accidental deletion, because once deleted, there is no way to get it back.

Opt-in forms can send automated notifications with subscriber data to you when a subscriber signs up to your list:

In step 2 of the opt-in form builder (as well as edit) you will notice a new section as you can see in the screen shot below:

Simply check that box, enter the email address that needs to receive the subscriber data, and finally enter the subject line for this email (for easy filtering using your favorite email client) and you are all set. Now, everytime a subscriber will fill out that opt-in form, you will receive an email with all of the subscriber’s data to the email address you entered. Now you can get notified the instant someone signs up!

And last but not the least

You can get the opt-in code as soon as you create/edit an optin form:

Remember how you had to go back to Manage Opt-in Forms page to get the form code after you created a new form? That will no longer be the case.

As you can see in the screen shot above, you will see a “get optin form code” button along with the confirmation message everytime you create/edit an optin form.

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