Mark Brownlow wrote a very comprehensive article that explains what deliverability is all about. So if you have no clue why your emails are not arriving in your recipient's mailboxes, read the article and find out why.

The folks over at Campaign Monitor re-tested some of the major web-based email clients. They found out that Windows Live Mail no longer supports styling links with CSS. Download a PDF summary of their findings here.

I recently found out that the only way I can get Windows Live Mail to underline my links is by putting underline tags within the a href tags... I wish that the Microsoft's, Yahoo's and AOL's of this world would just agree to using the same standards or at least provide us with an overview of what works and what doesn't in terms of coding!

What if you could make a slight change to one of your emails and get a 20 percent lift in opens or a 10 percent increase in sales? You would do it in an instant. But how do you know what element to change? That's where testing comes in. Email marketing makes it easy to quickly test important elements of your email-at very little or no extra cost. With testing, you can find out what factors influence the success of your email. Follow these five steps to create an effective, measurable test.

Step One: Decide What to Test
Because testing with email is so easy, it's often tempting to test many elements all at once. You should start by testing just one. Why? If you test more than one element in the same email, it is challenging (and sometimes impossible) to determine what exactly influenced the response. Here are some easy and telling tests to start with:

• Subject lines - Create two different subject lines for the same email communication.
• Long versus short copy - Is less really more? Create a shorter version of your current newsletter with teasers and links to your website. Or create two versions of a promotional email. Keep one very short and to the point and make the other a little longer by adding additional, useful information.
• Special offers - Create two different offers to see which one gets a better response.
• Other tests could include the time of day or day of the week you send, with an image or without, types of calls-to-action, and the placement of a call-to-action button or link. I'm sure that you will come up with other areas you would like to test as well.

What you put into your email marketing messages may not be as important as you once thought -- at least in terms of deliverability. According to Lyris Technologies’ EmailAdvisor ISP Delivery Report Card Q1 2007, reputation is the No. 1 factor that ISPs use when processing your emails.

“We’re seeing that delivery is still clearly a challenge, but it’s not what you’re including in the content; it’s about hygiene and reputation,” said Stefan Pollard, director of consulting services at EmailLabs. “The ISPs are looking at who’s on your list, are they clicking through, what are they doing with your email when they receive it and are you following up and cleaning your lists often and well?”

The answer, according to the study, is no. Only 83.88% of all ISP mail gets delivered, while only 74.57% of messages make it into the in-box. And it’s often the top ISPs that have the worst delivery rates; for example, Gmail sends 28% of messages to junk folders, while Yahoo sends 19% of messages to the bulk folder.

Pollard said marketers should heed the following advice to make sure their messages aren’t shuttled aside.

On June 21st, Eyetools Inc. CEO and founder, Greg Edwards will join eROI's Dylan Boyd to speak to about best practices in email design.

Learn the ‘What to dos' and the ‘What not to dos' from these seasoned industry professionals. They'll be looking at some before and after case studies to explore the difference even the smallest tweaks can make to the performance of your emails.

When: Thursday, June 21st at 11:00am PST (2pm EST, 8pm CET, 7pm GMT)

Register here

I finally managed to type out all my notes of the Email Insider Summit! :) I know you've been waiting for this for quite a while so I've done my best to type them out as detailed as possible. You can download all 8 pages here (pdf).

For those of you who don't like to read: I have good news! All sessions at the summit were videotaped and have recently be made available on the Mediapost website.

Happy reading or watching! :)