Tips for Sending Emails from Beacon

There are a numbers of ways in which you can reduce the likelihood of your Beacon emails not being delivered:

1. Minimise the frequency of sending emails to similar large lists (over 50) of recipients. It is better to delay until you have more information to put into a single email.
   
   
2. Avoid sending emails that the majority of recipients won't bother to open. It encourages the system to assume that messages from the sender are spam.
   
   
3. If you are sending an email to a large number of people, say over 50, please accept that your email will be processed by spam filters in the same way as mass marketing emails. Therefore you should follow the following industry guidelines for such mail.
   
   i) Avoid or minimise sending attachments when sending an email to large lists of recipients. It is tempting to do so, as Beacon and SendGrid enable you to do so, but it is recommended instead to put the files on to your website and to provide a weblink to let the user download the file if they want. You can alternatively use services such as Dropbox.
   
   ii) When putting a link (URL) into an email, do NOT use the URL itself as the clickable visible text. Instead use some descriptive English text. Note that this is the opposite of Beacon's previous guidance and is due to the way SendGrid handles links, and you may need to change some of your standard email messages.
   
   iii) Maximum organisation visibility helps as well. Including your physical mailing address and phone number in your email footers helps mail providers recognise you as a legitimate organisation and sender of email. This also helps your recipients know that this message is indeed from you!
   
   iv) Provide an explicit way for the recipient to unsubscribe from getting emails from you, even though you know they have said they want such emails. For example at the bottom of your email: "To unsubscribe from these mails email memsec@yourU3A with subject unsubscribe from emails."