Email marketing remains a useful tool for businesses to interact with customers and promote services. But with a plethora of spam emails being sent out, ISPs and email clients now employ strict spam filters to keep spammers away. Therefore, pushing your email campaign past these barriers and into your recipient’s inbox can be a daunting process. This white paper will show you some of the ways that you can stay in the Email Marketing maze and get your message in front of the right people.
Authenticate Your Email:
Anti-spam filter’s first line of defense is authentication. The use of Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) records can make your email much more likely to bypass filters. These policies validate who the sender is so that your emails are legitimate and are coming from the domains you claim.
Keep Lists Clean and Check Email Addresses:
Make sure your email list is clean and up-to-date. Check and unsubscribe active subscribers, hard bounces, and spam email addresses on a regular basis so your emails don’t get marked as spam. Adding double opt-in options when building your list can also keep your email list high quality. Additionally, email verification services can check for and filter out invalid or risky email addresses so your emails will not be tagged as spam.
Craft Engaging Subject Lines:
Subject lines are often analyzed by spam filters to determine whether an email is spam. Avoid spammy terms, ALL CAPS, unnecessary punctuation, and misleading subject lines. Instead, try to come up with compelling, relevant, and short subject lines that make people want to open your emails. By A/B testing different subject lines, you can determine the best fit for your target audience.
Optimize Content and Formatting:
Stay organized and keep your emails neat. Divide text into chunks, use headings, and make sure images are optimised with alt text. Overused links, especially those related to spam topics, will set off spam filters. Keep it to a minimum and only from reliable sources. Additionally, don’t overuse JavaScript and CSS in your email code because this can cause your email to be considered spam.
Monitor and Adjust Sending Frequency:
Too many emails too soon can cause subscribers to discard your emails as spam. Watch your sending frequency and tinker with it based on the subscriber’s response. Keep an eye out for unsubscribes and spam reports, and be ready to pivot if you need to.
Use a Trusted Email Marketing System:
The selection of an appropriate email marketing service plays a major role in overcoming spam filters and ensuring email deliverability. A trustworthy platform will have good sender credentials, email validation tools, and excellent customer service. There are a few points to take into account when choosing an email marketing service:
A. Sender Reputation: Choose an email marketing service that monitors and keeps track of its sender reputation. Good sender reputation means that your emails are less likely to get tagged as spam and more likely to be delivered to the target inbox.
B. Email Validation and Verification: Any quality email marketing service should contain automated validation and verification of email addresses. This makes it easier to maintain a cleansed email list, decrease the bounce rate, and increase the deliverability of emails.
C. Segmentation and Personalization: Personalized and segmented emails are more likely to be read and responded to, which reduces the chances of them getting marked as spam. Make sure to pick a platform that has a lot of segmentation and personalization tools.
D. Customer Support: If you’re using an email marketing platform that is good, it will give you good customer support. If you encounter delivery issues or spam complaints, our professional support team will work with you to diagnose and fix them promptly, with as little disruption as possible to your emails.
Remind Your Subscribers to Whitelist Your Emails:
Email whitelisting involves adding an email address of the sender to a trusted list, which prevents subsequent emails from being sent from that address. Whitelisting is a simple but powerful process to boost email deliverability and ensure that your emails get delivered to the desired inbox. Here are a few things you can do to get your readers to whitelist your emails:
A. Whitelisting – Instructing Subscribers
Educate and train them — that’s the first step to get your subscribers to act. Meanwhile, keep in mind that most subscribers wouldn’t even understand whitelisting and why it helps. Explain ESPs such as Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc to whitelist your email in easy English. This might, for instance, look something like this:
This could be requesting your recipients to drag your email from the ‘Promotions’ tab to their ‘Primary’ inbox in Gmail, entering your email address into their contacts in Outlook, or pressing the ‘Settings’ gear and then “More Settings,” then “Filters” to create a new filter in Yahoo. Visuals such as screenshots might support them more and maybe encourage them to.
B. Whitelisting Instructions Should Be Included In Welcome Emails
Once someone joins your mailing list it is a good opportunity to establish expectations and gain subscribers trust. Whitelisting guidance should be part of your welcome email routine. It is not only a way for them to know from the start that they are going to get your emails, but it also establishes trust between you and your new subscribers. Make sure they know that you’re working on valuable content and whitelisting your emails means they never miss out.
C. Regular Reminders
Whitelisting is going to take time to form a habit, and it requires reinforcement. Every once in a while, remind subscribers to check their spam or promotional folders and whitelist your email address. It’s a very significant thing if you happen to experience a decrease in email opens or conversions. This reminds your subscribers, helps you maintain your email list, and avoids having your emails mistaken for spam. Simply adding this to your monthly newsletter or creating a campaign to remind users will work well.
D. Provide Value
After all, the biggest reason for a subscriber to whitelist your emails is that you deliver valuable content consistently. Try to make every email useful, or fun, or both. Good content strengthens the bonds between subscribers and will set them up to believe in your emails and anticipate their messages. Test different types of content: educational posts, sponsored content, exclusives, or catchy images. Find out what resonates with your readers.
Conclusion:
Embracing the email marketing black hole is not an easy task to handle and manage. This is how you can increase your email campaign’s likelihood of escaping spam filters and reaching your subscribers by employing these tactics. If you keep an eye on your email performance and adjust as necessary, you’ll remain on the right path for a successful email marketing campaign.
