Everyone has an email address!
Emails are not going anywhere. They are versatile, they can be scheduled or automated, and emails are incredibly convenient and useful.
Email marketing has become a vibrant and powerful way to connect with people.
It’s the most direct and effective way to consistently connect with your leads, win them over, and turn them into customers.
Using this easy and inexpensive digital strategy, you can reach many people with just a message.
With email marketing, you can begin to build your email list to reach out to leads. If email marketing is an integral part of your marketing strategies, you want to make sure your messages reach your targeted audience.
Your targeted audiences are prospects and customers who have opted in for your emails. Emailing people who didn’t specifically opt-in for your email list would be a complete waste of your time and money.
As an email marketer, you always want to provide quality and engaging content to your subscribers. Having established these email marketing facts, ask yourself the following.
Where do my emails go?
Are my subscribers receiving and reading my emails?
Do you have low email open rates?
If your answers to these questions are uncertain and your open rates and deliverability are low, it’s time for you to make some drastic changes.
You may assume that since you’ve already gotten permission to send emails, your subscribers will receive your emails, and you are probably shocked by the low responses you receive from your subscribers.
One of the most apparent problems you might be experiencing is your emails getting sent to the subscriber’s spam folder after all your efforts.
These days, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep your emails out of your recipient’s spam folder with Yahoo, Gmail, and other email service providers. Most ESPs now automatically mark your emails as spam when you send commercial or bulk email to any email address at their domain.
When your marketing emails end up in the spam folder, It can become a severe issue for your brand/domain reputation and profitability.
Spam is an unsolicited, irrelevant email sent in bulk to a list of people who didn’t give you explicit permission to contact them. Spam has negative impacts on your email deliverability rates, and it makes your email marketing ineffective because your emails do not reach the recipients.
With an increase in spamming, filtering has become more rigorous, and different types of spam filters work to reduce the flow of unwanted emails out of people’s mailboxes.
The email service provides some of these filters, and the recipients customize some.
However, the filters are not 100% accurate, and sometimes, your legit emails can end up in spam, and various types of filters can influence deliverability and inbox placement.
Some of these spam filters include:
- Language filters – target and remove any emails that are not in the recipient’s native language or from the recipient country. Some of these language filters also remove emails with offensive language.
- Content filters – review the content within a message to determine if it is spam or not. These spam filters will flag emails based on specific content or images they contain. Also, overuse of certain words can trigger content filters, including money-related terms, like “free,” “discount,” and “lottery,”; or words that overly push for urgent action, like “hurry” or “last chance.”
- General blacklist filters – these filters stop all emails that come from a blacklisted file of known spammers.
No one likes to be spammed; it’s annoying.
As a successful business owner, you know better than to send bulk messages to people who did not sign up for your emails or want your information.
Even when you only send emails to your subscribers from your built-in opt-in list, they may still be getting filtered by overzealous ESPs.
ESP stands for Email Service Provider. In email marketing, EPS refers to the primary email providers such as Hotmail, Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail, etc. It’s the ESP job to protect its customers, your email recipients from receiving unwanted or unsolicited emails.
Your subscribers deserve to receive the emails they signed up for.
To ensure your email marketing efforts are significant, you need to understand how email spam filters work and figure out how to avoid ESPs and spam filters from infringing on your legitimate emails, newsletters, articles, etc.
Your best chance of landing in your prospects’ inboxes is to ensure your sending infrastructure is set up correctly, then avoid some of these spam filter pitfalls and protect your emails from overzealous EPSs.
Here are ten (10) ways to help keep your emails out of the spam folder –
1.Double-check your email list – before you start your email marketing campaign, you want to start on the right foot by ensuring that all your recipients expressly opted to receive your emails.
2. Send emails through verified domains – this is a crucial factor to note to avoid being perceived as a spammer by spam filters and your recipients. A verified domain keeps your emails out of spam folders, allows your recipients to recognize your emails, and instantly protects your brand reputation.
3. Have an exact IP address – make sure your IP address hasn’t been used by someone else who has spammed people. Authenticating your emails allows ESPs to acknowledge the legitimacy of your emails when you send them.
4. You can review the lists of words that ESPs consider “suspicious” – some of these words are common words, and a single-use of these words may not be enough to trigger the filter, but when used frequently, they can get your email blocked by a “spam” filter. You can use online content checkers to see words that could create problems with spam filters.
5. Clean up your mail list frequently – when your messages have low delivery and open rates, they seem less relevant and have tendencies to end up in your recipient’s spam folders. You can boost your recipients’ engagement rates by updating your email list and removing outdated addresses or unengaged subscribers. Keeping your list fresh will create a higher ratio of engaged recipients.
6. Create relevant and useful subject lines that increase your open rates – your subject lines determine your recipient’s first impression and engagement with your messages. Avoid misleading subject lines that deceive your recipients into opening them. Based on the email subject line alone, some recipients choose to report messages as spam. Be transparent with your subscribers about what the email contains from your subject lines.
7. Do not act like spam – avoid those spam trigger words that get flagged by spam filters. If you have to use words like ‘Free’ ‘Act now,’ ‘Buy now,’ ‘Bonus offer today only’ ‘Call now,’ to convey a message to your recipient that is relevant and valuable and use them sparingly.
Some other spam trigger words are –
cancel at any time
Click here
Congratulations
great offer
order now
promise you
Risk-free
special promotion
This is not spam
winner
8.Don’t send emails with too many images and sparse text – emails with very little text and many images, or emails simply composed of one large image, are more likely to be suspected as spam. Emails that look like adverts have a much lower open rate, and most ESPs don’t display images by default. Don’t render the content of your email unreadable. Save your recipient the extra work of choosing to display the image before knowing what the actual email was about.
9.Make your emails engaging – create content your recipients would always look forward to reading, and you will earn a better sender score. If your content sounds boring or only contains sales pitches, your prospects may mark it as junk or ignore it. These can send your emails spam folders, and it can affect your credibility and business reputation.
10.Don’t hide or exclude an unsubscribe link – Include an easy way for subscribers to opt-out of your emails by inserting an unsubscribe link in your emails to reduce spam issues. The more difficult you make it to unsubscribe from your mailing list, the more likely your recipients will mark your email as spam. If your subscribers want to stop receiving your emails, do not make the process frustrating. Let them do so by simply clicking the unsubscribe link you provide in your email to remove them from your email list. When this link is unavailable, they might decide to mark your email as spam. Not only will they stop receiving your emails, but other subscribers on your list might also stop receiving them.