Jim’s MessageFocus Top Tips: October

3 minute read

Upland Admin

Having a great email, with engaging content that your recipients will love is one thing, but sending it to the junk folder is another. This month I’ll be concentrating on inbox placement. We’ll look at how you can check your email campaigns to ensure you get the best deliverability rate possible when you launch. I’ll show you:

  1. the Link Check function
  2. how to run a Spam Check
  3. what’s included in a Content and Spam Check

1. Link Check

When you’re ready to test your campaign in MessageFocus, the first thing to do is to check that the links in your email all point to the correct websites. From the campaign overview screen, click the “˜Link Check’ button in the Testing area and MessageFocus will check all of your URL’s function correctly:

Uh oh, some of my links aren’t working!

Don’t panic; the red exclamation mark next to a link means MessageFocus couldn’t load the URL within a set time. It doesn’t always mean it’s broken, but it’s always best to check, just in case. If it doesn’t work when you click it, you’ll need to amend it in the HTML and text versions of your campaign. And if you’re not sure where the link is in your email, you can always contact the Support Team and ask them to take a look for you – they won’t mind. When you’ve corrected any broken links, you should see they all have green ticks next to them in the spam check. If they do, it’s then time to run a spam check.

2. Spam Check

The Spam Check feature in MessageFocus will give you an indication of the spam score for your campaign. It will give a warning for any major issues that may cause it to be marked as spam when delivered to your recipients.

In the example above some of the fonts in my email are too big. The easy “˜fix’ for the email is to reduce the font size for any text which I have set above 18pt (this is the threshold for font sizes before the spam checker will flag it as an issue). If you ever receive an unfamiliar spam warning, you can always contact the  Support Team for help resolving it.

3. Content Preview & Enhanced Spam Check

These final checks will flag any potential display, or spam, issues in the most common desktop, webmail and mobile email clients. The default Content Preview option, available for free in MessageFocus will give you an indication of how your email will render in Gmail and Outlook 2003.

To test more of the major desktop and mobile email clients, as well as spam filters get in touch with your Account Manager for more information.

The “˜Spam Check’ function that we saw earlier will identify any major issues with a campaign. However the enhanced spam check will look at how major spam filters will process your email and return results based on how many warnings it found.

If you click the “˜Details’ link beneath the spam filter showing errors, you will see more information concerning the issue which has been identified.

More information regarding Content Preview, can be found in another blog post here.

I hope that you find these tips useful, if you have a suggestion for a tip for a future blog I’d love to help – please email me at jim.ellis@adestra.com.

Look out for another 3 Top Tips next month and, as always, good luck with your email marketing endeavours.

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