Minimal requirements for sending emails with SalesAutopilot

Below you can find some of the key things that you must have in place for sending emails with SalesAutopilot. If your account needs to be examined because of your email sending habits (e.g. emails sent by you are reported as spam), these are the most fundamental things we will look for.

1.) NEVER send out unsolicited emails!

Some simple thoughts on this:

• An email is unsolicited if the recipient finds it unsolicited.
• If the email delivery is not expected then it is likely unsolicited.
• If someone recieves an email not because they intentionally subscribed for it, then it is unsolicited - even if the legislation allows that in your country.

2.) Have double opt-in subscription in place!

In case of popular newsletter topics it often happened that someone was subscribed to a newsletter by one of his friends or family members. No wonder that he simply unsubscribed or moved the email into the spam folder of the email client. Luckily, it is not tipical, but it may happen that the recipient of the unsolicited email reports the issue to the authorities. This can be avoided by having double opt-in subscription in place. The main point of this process is to have the subsciber confirm their subscription by clicking a link in a confirmation email they receive. Their subscription is completed when they click this link, and unless they do so, no further emails can be sent to them. So if they were subscribed by someone else, they can simply ignore this email and they will not receive any unsolicited emails.

Nowadays there are two main reasons why we recommend having a double opt-in subscription process in place

1. It is easy to show the authorities how you process and store data in your lists if someone reports you for sending unsolicited emails. You can simply show them double opt-in subscription method and it will be very difficult to say that you sent emails without the recipients consent.
2. Robots intend to subscribe more and more often, but they usually fail confirming the subscription so you can avoid sending email to these unreal subscribers again and again.

3.) Always have an unsubscribe link in your emails!

The unsubscribe link should always be legible and easy to find. We recommend that you place it not only in the footnote of your emails, but also in the intro - especially when you are planning to send out emails more frequently than usual - because this is how you can minimze the chance that a recipient will mark your email as spam. One unsubscribe is far better than having an angry person mark your email as spam.

Some people may abstain from using very visible unsubscribe links because they are afraid of having a higher number of accidental unsubscribes. If you feel this way, we kindly ask you not to hide the unsubscribe link, but instead have your recipients confirm that they want to unsubscribe on a separate page. The way this works is that when recipients click the unsubscribe link, they are taken to a different page where they have to click on another link to confirm that they want to unsubscribe. Without clicking on this confirmation link, they will not be unsubscribed. If you communicate with your subscribers through multiple channels and it is common to have an email address on more than one of your lists, then you may need to have that a multi-level unsubscribe process in place. A multi-level unsubscribe process means that when subscribers click on the unsubscribe link, then they are taken to a form where they have the following options:

• Unsubscribe from one ore more specific lists.
• Unsubscribe from all of your lists and from all future communication.

Such sophisticated methods give additional value to your brand and increase the feeling of satisfaction because the members of your audience can choose what they really need. Both the unsubscribe with a confirmation process and the multi-level unsubscribe process can be set up with SalesAutopilot.

4.) Clearly indentify your organization and newsletter in each of your emails!

This helps the recipient recall you as the sender - even if they have already forgotten who you are - by inserting some information that helps indentify you, possibly in the footnote where the ubnsubscibe link is also located:

1. Name your company.
2. Brand name if different from the company name.
3. Where, when and exactly what newsletter the subscriber subscribed to.
4. What email address the subscriber used when they subscribed.
5. Insert the ID number that any applicable authority provided for you. This is mandatory in some countries.

5.) Always test your email with an antispam verification tool!

We at SalesAutopilot use www.mail-tester.com, but you can use any other similar service, of course. The advantage of such services is that your email is auto-investigated by specific aspects and it is explained what you need to do to improve your email so that it gets delivered to as many recipients as possible.

We check each of our emails with Mail-Tester and we send out only 10-point emails. We recommend following the same practice. It will not be difficult to achive the 10 points WITHOUT EXTRA WORK each time with using the proper software, being over the technical settings and using a decent email template.

Using Mail-Tester is easy and fast:

1. Go to the Mail Tester page and copy the email address you see there.
2. Go to your email in your SalesAutopilot account and click on the 'Test delivery' button.
3. Click on the 'New subscriber' button and paste the email address.
4. Click on the 'Send test email' button.
5. Go back to the Mail Tester page and check the points your email achieved and send the URL of the results page to our customer support.

6.) Have the sender email address contain your domain name after the @ sign!

You may ask why. The short answer is because this is the professional way.

If the sender address contains your company's domain name, then it refers to an organization which legaly possesses the domain name. Accordingly, we don't recommend that you use Gmail, Yahoo or other remote addresses.

The detailed answer behind this recommendation is that setting a Gmail or Yahoo address as the sender address does not allow you to authenticate the sender address (SPF record, DKIM record). This authetication shows the mail servers of your recipients that SalesAutopilot is rightfully sending emails on your behalf with your sender address. Without this authentication, your email is more likely to end up in the spam folder, which is exactly what we are trying to avoid.

For a step-by-step description on how to set your SPF and DKIM records, please read the following knowledge base entry Authenticating the sender’s email address and setting the SPF record.