Don’t end up in spam: 4 tips to deliver successful newsletters
If your open rate drastically went down with no apparent explanation, don’t worry: your guests still love you. They simply didn’t get a chance to get your email in their Inboxes. Deliverability is a growing concern in email marketing: currently, one in every six messages sent worldwide fails to land in the inbox. If you don’t address this issue, you will spend time crafting great content that will never reach your readers’ eyes. So what’s the point?
No stress: we got this. In this blog article, we will explain why your emails are not delivered directly to the recipients’ Inboxes, and how to avoid it – so you can prevent your great content from going wasted. Your guests want to read you, but they need to receive your newsletter first!
Why aren’t my emails reaching Inboxes?
The reason is called Spam filters. Spam filters are programs that use multiple criteria in order to determine if an email is spam. Spam filters are actually your friend: they help clean up your contacts’ Inboxes from all the bad emails (currently, 59% of all the emails sent worldwide is spam!), making space for your valuable messages.
But spam filters are not human, they don’t have the ability to analyze a text within its context. They use strict protocols in order to identify spam indicators, so sometimes they end up flagging the good emails.
Here are some helpful tips to avoid spam filters – and successfully land your emails to your contacts’ Inboxes.
1. Always send your emails from your own domain
Do not use free web-based email addresses such as @gmail.com or @yahoo.com to send your bulk emails. Instead, create your own domain and link it to your website. Spam filters pay particular attention to the sender address. Also, always make sure that your website is active and running!
Tip: try to personalize your sender address. For your “from” field name, use a reliable, better if personal, name. For example: Kathy@yourdomain.com.
2. Verify your domain
There’s a step further you can take to improve the deliverability of your emails: it’s the domain authentication. By validating your domain, you help Spam filters tolerate your bulk mailing.
Not sure how to do that? Read here the Top 25+ Bulk Email Verification and Validation Services Compared by Litlsy.
3. Watch your content!
Here we go to the hot part. Apart from the technical aspects listed above, the main reason why some emails raise alerts with spam filters is that they include spammy looking content. Spam filters are always checking your content: in particular, they watch closely to specific words or phrases that they associate with spam.
Here’s a list of useful tips to avoid spam content when writing your email – and limit the risk of landing in the wrong folder.
- Avoid fishy expressions, such as “Click here now!” or “This is not spam!”. Those are usually included in communications about miraculous diet pills and how to make 1 million dollars in 5 minutes. So it’s definitely not your case.
- Do not type in ALL CAPITALIZED WORDS in your subject line or body text. IT FEELS LIKE YOU’RE SCREAMING!
- Avoid writing text in red and other loud colors.
- Do not use excessive exclamation points!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- Limit spammy type words and symbols, such as “free”, “sale”, or “$”.
- Send relevant content, that your readers are expecting. Otherwise, they will mark you as spam. Read here some ideas for brilliant content.
- Keep the length reasonable. That means around 20 lines for your body copy and between 35 to 50 characters for your subject line. That can vary depending on the purpose of your email; as a general rule, keep in mind that spam filters don’t like overlong emails.
- Do not include too many images in your body text. It’s ok to integrate your message with pictures, but try not to overdo that. Not only images burden your email file size, making it difficult for your readers to load, but they are also seen as blank spaces by spam filters.
- Check your links. Always make sure you only link reputable domains that will drive your readers to reliable sites.
4. Clean your contact lists
Last but not least: it is absolutely crucial that you update your contact list periodically, cleaning it from undeliverable and inactive addresses. If you keep poor email addresses in your list, your bounce rate will increase significantly: as a consequence, the spam filters will mark your emails as spam worthy. If you keep a high sender score, instead, you will avoid intensive filtering, and get better chances to see your valuable email delivered to the recipient’s Inbox.
