Whitelisting happens when an email recipient (your customer) requests her email application such as Microsoft Outlook or an ISP such as Yahoo Mail or GMail to add the sender (you, the company) to the address book or contact list. Doing so will help the ISP or the email client to direct your emails to the recipient’s inbox rather than to a junk folder. This in turn increases the opportunity that the subscriber will open your email, which may motivate her to take the desired action. Further, you can maintain your brand presence and build an on-going relationship. This approach will create an uplift in your marketing metrics and could improve your deliverability rates too.

Lately, some marketers have dropped the idea of urging their newer subscribers to whitelist the sender’s email id or domains. The reason being that the delivery into an inbox is more dependent on sender’s reputation. True, but I still see a good number of emails from highly recognizable brands land in my spam/junk folder. However, it is not consistent either. Sometimes they do land in my inbox. Why don’t they land in my inbox all the time? It could be for a number of reasons. You see, the email client application or the ISP systems do not have the intelligence to figure this out on a consistent basis. So, the responsibility falls on the part of the marketer to educate their subscribers to whitelist the sender. It’s easy if you just make this part of your process.

We recommend our clients to encourage their prospects, customers, and subscribers to whitelist their email id. There is no better time to accomplish this task than when the subscriber or prospect opts-in to receive communications from you for the first time. We suggest that you give your users clear directions on how to whitelist your emails by selecting major ISPs and email applications. You can include these instructions as part of your welcome email or just after sending the welcome email. For example, you could say this for Yahoo Mail users:

Yahoo Mail users: If you find our email in your “Spam” folder, open the message and click the “Not Spam” button. You can find this button between the buttons ‘Forward” and “Move” just above the message header.

Want to get more specific? Include an image of where the users can find this button (like this one below).

This is even more important for certain types of transactional communications that may require the recipient to print a part of the email such as tickets to a sporting event, airline tickets, or clicking a link to confirm or check a transaction.

With our system, Vanilla\Connect, this process can be accomplished through our autoprocessors, where clients can configure when to send a whitelist cheat-sheet to their subscribers. Once configured, anytime a new subscriber opts-in, Vanilla\Connect can send the whitelist message – all done automatically. You can also segment those recipients who have not opened your whitelist request email and gently remind them in, say, 2 weeks, to consider whitelisting you. With Vanilla\Connect, you can automate this reminder too.