You’re doing all the right things – publishing engaging content to attract your target buyer, offering valuable resources and building your subscriber list, nurturing your leads and building relationships with them through email. But, then you notice the low click-through rate and high bounce rate. Something’s wrong.
Email is essential to any inbound marketing strategy. It’s reported that “59% of B2B marketers say email is their most effective channel in terms of revenue generation.” (WordStream) Email is also one of the best ways to communicate with potential customers and gain exposure for your business. However, you can’t reap the benefits of email marketing if your emails are flagged as spam.
15 Tips to Spam-Proof Your Email Marketing Campaigns
If your email marketing campaigns aren’t producing the results you expect, there are a few things to analyze and optimize – subject line, copy, and frequency being the main ones. However, there are also missteps you may be making that are sending your emails into your subscribers’ spam folders. We’ve found that a few small tweaks can help.
Here are our top tips to prevent your emails from ending up in spam:
- Your email should be no shorter than 500 characters and have a maximum width of 600-800 pixels so that recipients can read it across all platforms. If you’re sending an HTML email, avoid using a design-heavy template.
- Set up an email preference center where subscribers can choose how often they want to receive emails from you. And don’t forget to include an unsubscribe option, as required by the CAN-SPAM Act and GDPR.
- Make sure to include a valid address at the end of all emails. If you don’t want to disclose your personal address, use a P.O. box.
- Never send raw URLs. Instead, use a hyperlink with anchor text. Also, try to limit the number of links per email to one or two.
- Keep an eye on your email metrics. Pay close attention to click-through rates, conversion rates, and your leads to customer ratio. Low open rates can lead to emails ending up in spam. To raise open rates, optimize your email messages for mobile. 70% of people delete emails immediately if they can’t open and read them on their mobile device.
- Email segmentation can help increase open rates, resulting in fewer emails ending up in the spam box. Group your subscribers based on things like interests and location to personalize your emails.
- Keep your “from” name simple. Use your name, your company’s name, or a combination of both. For example, John Smith at SMA Marketing. Keep an eye on the subject line of your email as well. Your subject should clearly represent the email topic.
- Don’t use spam trigger words. Use a tool like ISnotSPAM to check your emails for keywords.
- Use memorable and consistent branding, so your messages are recognizable and recipients don’t mark them as spam.
- Use a real-time email verification and validation tool to catch typos when subscribers enter their email address and receive alerts of fake email addresses.
- Use the double opt-in method, which involves sending subscribers a welcome email that asks them if they want to continue receiving emails from you in the future. If they select yes, then they will be added to your official subscriber list. The double opt-in helps ensure that the people receiving emails from you are actually interested in your business.
- Authenticate your email to prove that you are who you claim to be and that you are a reliable source. Learn more about email authentication from Computer Weekly.
- Remove unengaged users and role email addresses from your email list. A role email address is used by multiple people and represents a department within a company. Some examples include names like info@, contact@, or admin@.
- Develop a sunset policy. A sunset policy establishes that after a certain amount of time, unengaged subscribers will be removed from your email list.
- Encourage your subscribers to whitelist your email. A whitelist, also called a safe sender list, ensures that your email will make it to the inbox. Act-On provides tips on whitelisting.
