Email marketing databases are filled with hundreds or thousands of email addresses, from just about every email hosting service in the world. Although you will find that the majority of the people on your email marketing lists are using the top several email services, you will inevitably run into many others that you are not familiar with. This means you may have to be careful. Although you may be well versed in Gmail or Hotmail, you may have no idea how some of the smaller services handle inbox filtering and images. Unfortunately, this often means that you could be inadvertently blocked, even if the people on your email marketing lists are all hoping to hear from you. Sometimes it will require a special action on the part of the recipient in order for your email to reach them—making it less likely that your email will actually get to every person in your email marketing databases.
What you have to really avoid, at nearly all cost, is being labeled as a spammer. Once this happens, your email marketing databases become less valuable, as your entire campaign can be called into question. Email marketing can be tricky. There are multiple steps involved, not only getting email marketing lists developed. That is only the first part, getting your email offer into the hands of everyone on your email marketing lists is not a simple task.
One way to help ensure that your email is received properly is to avoid putting anything questionable into the email itself. If you have large images, animation or any kind of special effects, then you may want to just include a small thumbprint image or have a link to the full image available. This helps to sort out recipients on your email marketing lists, and helps to avoid being called into question if your email contains content that cannot be properly scanned. Most email hosting services will err on the side of caution and send something to the spam folder, rather than have it head straight into the inbox. Unless the folks on your email marketing list are regular skimmers of their spam folder, your well crafted and enticing offer can go completely unnoticed.
Another possibility is to use alt tags for the images, so even if the people on your email marketing list cannot see the image when they open your email, they have an idea of what it is about. This can help gain their interest and see that you are a legitimate email marketer. Remember to always test your email on yourself, to make sure you know what the people on your email marketing databases are going to be viewing so you can make sure it looks the way you want.