By Becki Woods
There’s nothing worse than spending your hard-earned marketing budget on an email campaign that gets eaten by a hungry spam folder.
Email services providers such as Gmail, AOL and Yahoo are increasingly cracking down on what they term spam emails and, therefore, it is harder to know what is going to result in a successful delivery.
Having said that, there are some basic things you can do to ensure that your email campaign stands the best chance of delivery.
1. Get familiar with what is seen as spam
Even if you are new to email marketing, you will have been on the receiving end of some sumptuously spamtastic emails at some point; email service providers have become familiar with the things usually seen in these emails and will, more often than not, designate an email into the spam folder if it has:
- Overuse of the terms “free”, “winner” and anything related to porn or Viagra.
- Overuse of capital letters and exclamation marks “YOU COULD WIN NOW!!!!!” for example.
- Use of too many fonts and text colours – you may as well give it a subject line saying: “this email is spam”.
The lesson here is to keep it light, friendly and professional. You wouldn’t add a hundred different fonts and colours to your website, so why do it in your emails?
Use your website as the model for your emails, you should be doing this anyway to ensure brand consistency.
2. Avoid bad code
Do not fall into the trap of coding your HTML templates yourself if you’re not well versed in code; being able to wrap tags around a word does not make you an HTML genius and attempting it yourself if you’re not an expert is a false economy.
Not only does it break your templates, email service providers see broken code as indication that an email is spammy; so your email looks terrible and no one will read it anyway, great move.
3. Clean your email list
If you regularly send email campaigns to email addresses that don’t work or are no longer in use, you could get your IP address blacklisted as spam.
There are tools you can use to test whether or not your email addresses are still in use. Make sure you do this before sending out your campaign.
4. Keep your email list warm
No, we don’t mean wrap it up in a furry blanket (although that sounds nice), we mean that you should make sure that the people on your email list are people that are interested in your products and services. Buying data has its merits in some contexts but it is risky when you don’t know who the people are.
If you send unsolicited emails to thousands of people, some of these people are likely to mark your email as spam. This will get you blacklisted.
Use your CRM to create email lists based on what you have offered in the past. That way, you stand a far higher chance of conversion.
5. Make it easy to unsubscribe
This may seem counterproductive to a campaign where you want maximum engagement from your customers.
However, you cannot control who will and will not be happy to have received your email; if someone can’t find the unsubscribe button, they are likely to mark your email as spam. Again, this will get you blacklisted.
We suggest making it an easy to see button; also, don’t make your reader jump through hoops to unsubscribe either, in the hope they will give up; that is bad form.
6. Be mobile responsive
Make sure your HTML is set up for mobile devices; this will ensure that your readers get a good experience when they open your email.
It’s incredibly annoying to open an important email, when out and about, that has links too close together and sideways scrolling; it’s so 2005.
Remember that good experiences contribute to good engagement and, ultimately, profit.
7. Do not make your email one big image
Lots of people do not like their browser to download images. Also, sending someone a large image is an easy way to be eaten by the spam folder.
By all means, have images in your post however; just balance them with an appropriate amount of text.
8. Get onto email whitelists
You have a higher chance of making their whitelist if they reply to your email.
You can approach this by including something that incentivises a reply from the reader like a free gift or an email-specific special offer.
Also, if you can get a user to add you to their contacts then that makes sure you go straight into their inbox next time you do a campaign; job done.
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