Absolutely. Ideally, you send emails people want. That's more than half the battle. You also need to make your content interesting and relevant to the recipient.

There are a few things to keep in mind about your email content. First, we suggest setting up a test mailbox athttp://www.mail-tester.com. Mail-Tester will give you a full analysis of your email for free. Here are a few other things to consider:

• Personalise your emails. Make sure you include the recipient's address in the “To:” field and their name in the greeting.
• It is better to send multipart emails using both text and HTML, or text only. Sending HTML-only emails is not well received by ESPs. Also remember that ESPs usually block images by default, so HTML won't look great unless users proactively enable images.
• Test how your HTML email looks in all email clients and browsers.LitmusandReturn Pathhave tools for this.
• Make your content relevant and targeted to the recipient. There are even tools likeMovable Inkthat let you update your content dynamically after it has been delivered.
• The higher your text-to-link and text-to-image ratios, the better. Too many links and images trigger spam flags at ESPs.
• Spelling mistakes and spam words (buy now!, Free!) are big spam indicators, as are ALL CAPITALS AND EXCLAMATION MARKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• The From field in your emails must match the domain you are sending from. Hotmail is particularly focused on this.
• Make sure you use unsubscribe links and headers in your emails. Many ESPs (especially Hotmail) pay attention to them and, if they are missing, you risk being filtered. You can always use Sparrow's automatic unsubscribe management if you don't want to handle this yourself.
• Include your physical postal address. CAN-SPAM requires an unsubscribe link and a physical mailing address. It is also a good idea to link to your privacy policy.
• Gmail pays particular attention to the Message-ID and Received headers. Malformed message IDs (without <> brackets and with an incorrect domain after @) can make Gmail think you are a spammer. The easiest way to get the right Message-ID is not to set it at all. Sparrow will then create a perfect Message-ID for you. And if you use the HTTP API, Sparrow takes care of all this for you.
• Links must include the domain sending the email. In addition, popular URL shorteners can be a bad idea because they are frequently used by spammers.
• Long links can cause bounces. Some ESPs block emails containing links (or any consecutive text) longer than 99 characters.
• A/B test your emails to optimise recipient engagement. Subject lines are especially important. You can use Sparrow's tagging and tracking statistics to measure A/B tests and improve your content.