One of the ten commandments of email marketing is to always encourage your recipients to add your email address to their contact list / address book.  Many email clients (like Microsoft Outlook) will automatically white list emails coming from one of the contacts in the address book: to put it another way, your email will not be categorized as spam if they add your email address to their contacts list.

Now getting the recipient to do this is a challenge in and of itself.  The goal is to make the process so simple that they can’t help but do it.

I recently signed up for an email newsletter, and after I confirmed my subscription (as any good double opt-in email newsletter does) – I saw this page:

As you can see at the bottom, they’ve offered me an easy way to add their email to my contacts list – using a VCard.  A VCard is a file that is recognized by most email clients.

Now truth be told, I think that they could have made the call to action more compelling with better graphics and messaging … but a good “college try” none the less.  And a great use of technology !