Delivery Throttling – throttling is the practice of gradually sending out emails to a database rather than sending them all at once. The reason for doing this is many email providers will block a sender if too many emails are received from them in too short a period of time. This practice is only necessary if you have thousands of prospects in your database or if you have several hundred emails in your database from a single provider (eg. @hotmail.com). To throttle your emails split your database into chunks of no more than 300 emails each. When you send to each group of 300 put a couple of hours in between each mailings. Do this by scheduling the mailings within your email service provider.
Throttling can help you determine the best times to send your campaigns. Send your emails anytime between 6AM and 10PM and look at the different campaign reports to see which days and times had the best and worst open rates.
Mark As Spam Link/Email – most email programs allow people to mark emails as spam simply by clicking an easily found button on the screen. Very few people realize the significance of clicking this button. Almost everyone thinks clicking the ‘mark as spam’ button only adds the sender to person’s blocked list of senders. While many email programs do this, clicking the mark as spam button sends a message to the email provider that your email was spam. This is a damaging thing to do! Email service providers only allow you to receive 1-2 spam complaints for every 2-3 thousand emails sent. If you get more complaints than that over several campaigns the ESP will often terminate your account immediately and without any refund and block you from registering a new account.
The bad thing about the “mark as spam” button is few (if any) email providers inform the person the significance of what they’re doing before they do it. Most people don’t think there’s any difference between clicking this button and clicking the unsubscribe link. Some people click the mark as spam button to unsubscribe because this button is always in the same place, whereas the unsubscribe link is almost always put at the bottom of emails and often in very small print, so it’s easy to miss.
