OK, probably not the very first PC but the first popular one. In fact, to call it a PC is not fair and some may even suggest sacrilegious. It was an Apple II+ and in the early 80s, it was very cool.

Fast forward several years (I would appreciate you not doing the math) and, while having dinner with a friend from New York, I first saw the iPhone. No two ways about it, it was cool. And on July 11th, when they first came to Canada, I had to have one.

Luckily, a friend of mine at my former employer had a line on an unlikely place for a stache of iPhones that morning – the corporate head office of a local reseller. So, I crawled out of bed at 6am and headed out to their office where, along with my friend, we perched in our lawn chairs in line for the phone.

While lots of people lined up at other retail stores that morning, there was perhaps no more pathetic sight than that of two guys, sitting in lawn chairs for hours, all by themselves. Yep, it was such a good plan that no one else came. We sat there by ourselves as every employee coming to the office walked by, shaking their heads. We looked goofy.

Of course, after we got our iPhones, all was good. It is indeed everything that people say. After years on a Blackberry, it was very cool to see our company’s emails coming in with all their full HTML formatting, looking good…

That was now. Three months ago, those emails would have looked goofy. Month after month, we’d been pumping out emails that looked great in Outlook 2003. Then a friend of mine in the email marketing business warned me about Outlook 2007. Turns out that Microsoft’s implementation in 2007 depricated a bunch of different HTML functionality. The result is when I looked at our emails in Outlook 2007, the formatting blew up – it looked goofy. And our emails never looked quite right in GMail. And I don’t even want to think what they would have looked like on my iPhone.

What did we do?

The first thing we did was to remove all <style> commands and moved to in-line CSS. In addition, we converted everything to tables. This is the kind of stuff your web developer should be able to do.

A really cool tool we used was provided by Campaign Monitor. Their testing site allows you to pit your email against virtually every web, thick and mobile email client. For the micro business, this is a god-send. You literally get something that looks like the screen shot below… Do up your template and test it – it only costs $10 a shot.

So – if you haven’t done testing on what your emails look like, how do you know you don’t look goofy?

C.

We have debated the use of “Free” in our emails to our base. Would it get through or would it be stopped as spam. For about a year, we’ve avoided it and used terms like “no-cost”, “complimentary” or “it’s fizzle my bizzle” (that one’s just for Snoop).

All those words are lammo campared to FREE but if half the emails aren’t going to get through ’cause they get tagged as spam, then it’s better not to…

So, like most things, we put it to the test… And the envelope please…

“Free” kicked butt – again and again, our response rates have been higher using the word. Debate closed!

But not so fast: that one word is just one of the myriad of factors used to decide if your email is spam. The reputation of your sending ISP to the percentage of HTML code versus text to the use of specific words can all impact your score. And of course, it varies from one spam filter solution to another.

If you’re a big company, you’ve likely got an email provider with all sorts of helpful services on this front. As a micro business, however, it’s tougher.

What do we do? We take a sample of our emails (a newsletter, a sales tip, a promotional offer, etc…) and run it through a great service from Campaign Monitor. They do a bunch of stuff but one thing that we use is their spam testing service where for about 10 bucks, you can test your email against a variety of spam filters (example screen shown below).

Occasionally test your emails, find out what is driving your spam rating and fix it. That way you’ll maximize the number of emails that actually get to your clients and prospects. And you can say “Free”.

Chris