Gmail as one of the big providers of free email service provides guidelines for bulk email senders — or email marketers — to get their emails delivered in the inbox.

The page includes technical information and best practices on email marketing especially on how you can land your email on Gmail users’ inboxes.

For example, Gmail will favor email messages which “From:” address is listed in the user’s Contacts list. A user who clicks “Not Spam” to alert Gmail that messages sent from that address are solicited also help Google get their filter right.

Having abuse@yourdomain.com is also recommended if you use third party services. I think this is a best practice that has been forgotten.

If with all your efforts to comply to the guidelines and still your email continues to land on the Spam folder, then you can contact the Gmail team. Very helpful if that actually works.

Read the whole article for full information.

Thanks Tamara Gielen of Email Marketing Best Practices for pointing this out.

The Email Experience Council partners with BrightWave Marketing to establish a first centralized online repository of statistics and research specific to the email marketing industry.

You can browse categories from authentication, automated messages, to branding, segmentation, spam, subject lines and white papers. The categories are sorted alphabetically.

This source of email marketing metrics is also sponsored by Got Corporation.

Visit the site here.

Chad White suggests us to look further into the role of our subscribers. He writes that if we see email subscribers only as buyers, then we’re thinking too narrowly.

Here are some of the roles major online retailers have tried to cast their subscribers:

• Employee/recruiter. Email subscribers have already been familiar with your brand and products. That is a bid advantage over random strangers out there.
• Content provider. Retailers announced their move to hire bloggers through email list. Other content contributed by subscribers include newsletter, reviews, user feedbacks, etc.
• Model. Abercrombie & Fitch put out a call for models in email with the subject line “Casting Call for the next Abercrombie & Fitch Photo Shoot.”
• Volunteer. Often subscribers are also willing to volunteer because they feel like being part of the newsletter they subscribe to.

If you build great relationship with your email list, then they tend to be your best customers. They are often willing to get involved in other things beyond wiping credit cards to purchase products. So, take advantage of the fact to further improve relationships.

Suppose something was wrong with an email campaign, embarrassment may be the least of your problems. In addition to lost revenue, you may reduce your future deliverability and even get in trouble with the law.

This isn’t the same with web ad campaign, when if there is a problem with it, your face may be red.

Those are the facts Wendy Roth gave to lead into her newest article for iMedia Connection titled Email Quality Control in 8 Steps. I should say that’s really a great way to grab my attention to the whole article.

What do you do before you hit the “send” button? Here are the checklist to make sure you don’t forget anything:

1. Are you sending to the right list? Make sure you are selecting the right list.
2. Make sure the “from” address works. Recipients sometimes reply to the “from” address instead of “reply-to.”
3. Make the subject line accurate, short and compelling. Longer subject line will be trimmed by most email application and webmail.
4. Include a link to read the message outside of email. “Read online” link provides an alternative to those who can’t read your message.
5. Check all images and links. Make sure the links and redirects are working. So simple but critical.
6. Include a working unsubscribe link.
7. Include a physical address. Be Can-Spam compliant.
8. View the message through several different email accounts. At least check in several webmails and email apps to make sure it is displayed properly.

Save your revenue by checking your campaign before sending. You could just save your company’s asset by these simple checklist and prevent bigger problems.

A test conducted by Marketing Experiments and published by iMedia Connection in November 2006 showed that conversion rates from rented email list outperformed every other marketing channel, including organic site traffic, AdWords trafic, and Yahoo! Search PPC.

This is another prove that email marketing is alive and well. Internet marketers should not focus only on the cutting-edge tactics while neglecting existing channels that are already well establish and working.

The study involved a financial publisher, offering trials to its product.

Here is the summary of the results, in tabular format:

As you can see, emails have more than double the conversion rate than organic site traffic. AdWords and Yahoo! Search follow after that.

Of course, we can’t be too confident with such report unless we actually factor in other details such as what keywords and key phrases were used during the experiment, which rented list was used, etc.

If there is only one lesson to take from this experiment, again is the fact that email marketing should be a marketing channel that none of us should overlook.

[iMediaConnection]