Email marketing is an incredible tool. Not only is it cost and time effective, but it’s also a fantastic way to direct more traffic towards your website. That is, of course, if your target audience see it. If your emails are heading straight to people’s spam inbox, your efforts will be wasted. Spam filters are put in place for a reason, and to avoid triggering them there are a number of best practices you should follow.
- Use a reputable Email Marketing Service (EMS)
- Avoid spam trigger vocabulary
- Keep it professional
- Create a good text to image ratio
- Test your emails with a spam checker
Spam filters are designed to pick up fraudulent or harmful emails, often identifiable by the addresses from which they have been sent. In order to avoid being wrongly labelled as spam, it is important to send your emails via a reputable Email Marketing Service. A good EMS should mean that you’re automatically whitelisted by servers like Hotmail and gmail.
Another way to avoid being mistaken for junk is to ask your recipients to whitelist you themselves. Asking your clients to add your server address is a quick, easy, and mutually beneficial way to ensure that all future emails head to the right place.
Although there is no definitive list of spam triggers, there are certain words and phrases you should refrain from including in your emails. For instance, vocabulary associated with sales or recruitment, such as “act now”, “affordable”, “guarantee” and “satisfaction”, are often flagged as phishing phrases. If you can, you should also avoid any words or phrases which could associate you with fraud, such as “credit card” or “unlimited”.
Staying clear of freighted vocabulary isn’t the only way to avoid being marked as spam. For best results, keep your content looking and sounding as professional as possible with correct spelling and grammar. Spam filters tend to pick up on words which have been capitalised randomly, misspelt, or have been written in colour, so keep your content quality consistent.
Image-heavy emails are often flagged as suspicious, especially if there is little text to accompany each graphic. If you don’t need to use images, don’t. But, if images are integral to your email marketing campaign, try to make sure that you’ve included at least 2-3 lines of text for every picture used, and ensure that the HTMLs are consistent throughout.
As with most things, conducting a test is the most efficient way of knowing if your emails are reaching your audience, or whether they’re sitting unread in their spam folder. Using a spam checker is a surefire way to find this out, and will alert you to any parts of your content which may be confused as spam. This is a great way to save time, and to make sure that your audience get the content they’ve signed up for!
We understand just how infuriating spam mail can be, which is why we’re specialists in providing anti-spam solutions. If you’re ready to invest in a spam email filter, contact us as Mailcleaner today.