Tips for Increasing AOL E-Mail Delivery Rates, Part 1
AOL has specific e-mail issues marketers must be aware of. Tips for optimizing AOL e-mail delivery and performance. Part one of a series.
AOL has specific e-mail issues marketers must be aware of. Tips for optimizing AOL e-mail delivery and performance. Part one of a series.
E-mail communications with America Online (AOL) users has long been a top challenge for business-to-consumer (B2C) email marketers. Though AOL’s subscriber base has declined in recent years, they still comprise 20 to 25 percent of email databases for most B2C marketers. Optimizing messages for AOL and AOL subscriber preferences can pay significant dividends in improved delivery and performance.
AOL Delivery Challenges
AOL subscribers tend to be different from the rest your subscriber base. A 2003 Lucid Marketing study outlined a number of important AOL user preferences and habits, including:
The AOL service and software client also create specific issues email marketers must be aware of, including as the use of a sender whitelist, Sender Policy Framework (SPF) adoption, lack of a sender name, very limited subject line length, a “report spam” button, and more.
AOL Optimization Tips
In light of these and other challenges, following are tips to help optimize AOL email delivery and performance:
Always test all email message links in to ensure proper coding. Check HTML syntax in HomeSite, Dreamweaver, or another HTML editor.
Got any great AOL tips? Please email us. We’ll include them in a future column Next time: message formats, send time, spam complaints, and more.
Until next month, keep on deliverin’.
Want more email marketing information? ClickZ E-Mail Reference is an archive of all our email columns, organized by topic.