Whitelisting your publications
Do you provide instructions to your email newsletter subscribers about how to put your publication on their whitelist? I never even thought about it until I attended a teleseminar a couple of weeks ago hosted by Marketing Sherpa. One of the many tips they suggested is to provide a link to written instructions about how to put your e-newsletter's email address on the subscriber's whitelist.
The stats are interesting. Only 22% of ezine publishers request that their subscribers add them to their whitelist. Of those 22%, only 7% provide instructions and the rest simply make a statement requesting to be whitelisted.
This got me thinking. There are so many different mailing systems and ISPs, how do you address all the ways your subscribers and their respective ISPs may be filtering email?
In my research, I found a cool free tool at Clean My Mailbox. They provide a whitelist tool. The Whitelist Tool is a "free tool to generate these specific instructions on how to whitelist your publication(s) within a variety of popular fitering solutions in use today."
Simply put, you complete a few fields of information about your publication, your email address and the static IP address of your mail server. If you don't know this information you'll have to connect your mail server.
After you enter all the info, you click on a button to generate the HTML that you can then use to create a webpage and post on your website. They cover instructions for whitelisting for 18 mail services. What this means is that you do not have to figure all this stuff out for yourself. Clean My Mailbox has done it all for you. I love that.
After you posted the webpage of instructions on your site, then add the link to your newsletter confirmation email. This will provide the opportunity for your subscribers to take things further than just reading your request and then forgetting about it. The link is right there and subscribers are more likely to take action and your email has a much better chance of getting through.
