4 Ways to Overcome Whitelisting Challenges
Posted by Drew Miller on March 20th, 2009
You see it in the pre-header section above the main message in many of the emails you get on a daily basis. It’s usually in a microscopic font and a light shade of gray with verbiage something like this: “Please add xyz@company.com to your address book.” Odds are you didn’t give it a second look and went right on down to the main message.
When it comes to Email Marketing best practices, providing whitelisting instructions to your recipients has always been an effective way to help ensure your messages land where they should – the inbox. But beyond the deliverability aspect, whitelisting has its share of problems too. Here are some of the biggest challenges:
- Visibility – Easily overlooked because of its usual small, lighter colored fonts.
- Familiarity – Used consistently message over message, customers will learn to block this part of your message out.
- Relevancy – Your customers opened your message for a reason, and – surprise – it wasn’t to add you to their address book.
- Time – Your customers’ time is valuable, and adding you to their contacts (however easy it may be) is just not worth it for them.
- Reasoning – Most marketers fail to provide a good reason “why” customers should take action.
With so many challenges, should you abandon whitelisting entirely? Not exactly. Here are four ideas to make the most of your whitelisting efforts:
- Make it dynamic – Provide custom instructions based on their specific ISP using similar verbiage (”address book”, “contacts”, etc.). This is especially beneficial to those with a majority of their database using web-based ISP’s such as Yahoo! And Gmail.
- Explain the importance – Give your readers a specific reason to whitelist you (ex: “Don’t miss out on our specials…”)
- More emphasis early – The most important time to encourage whitelisting is in your welcome message – one of the most highly read emails in your arsenal. In the next 2-3 campaigns, try emphasizing whitelisting in your pre-header by using a slightly larger font and a darker color (other than light gray). Be cautious to not put too much emphasis on whitelisting as it may distract from your main call-to-action.
- Gradually phase out – After your second or third email campaign, if your customers haven’t already whitelisted you, odds are they never will. At this point you may want to consider using your pre-header for more useful items such as a text-link to your main call-to-action.
By taking the right approach to whitelisting, you can increase deliverability AND optimize the valuable real estate in the pre-header section.
