Picture this, you spend weeks crafting the perfect email automation campaign for your different segments. You finally hit “Publish” and wait for the results to roll in… but nothing.
In fact, it looks like barely anyone is even opening your emails! This situation, a marketer’s nightmare, is what happens when your email campaigns get flagged for spam and don’t even make it to your customers or clients inboxes.
Why and how does this happen?
What steps can you take to prevent your emails from getting lost in the abyss that is the spam folder?
In this short guide, we’ll be discussing why your emails may be getting marked as spam, and the top tips and strategies you can start implementing today to not only prevent being flagged but to ensure higher deliverability and success with your campaigns.
Why Emails Get Sent to Spam
There’s a multitude of reasons why your emails may get banished to the spam box. Among them are the health of your email list, your current authentication or certification statuses, the actual value you’re providing your recipients, and the accuracy of your email metrics.
If you have the occasional email get sent to spam, even when you think you’re following all of the right guidelines and procedures, don’t sweat it. Even expert email marketers will experience issues with the deliverability of their emails from time to time.
While the occasional accidental spam email shouldn’t damage your reputation or deliverability long term, if it becomes a recurring habit, it definitely will, and the results of all your future campaigns will suffer significantly.
Top Tips To Ensure Higher Inbox Delivery Rates
Now, let’s get into the top tips to prevent this nightmare from happening.
- Focus on Warm Leads when Doing Cold Outreach
The most important rule of thumb to follow to avoid staying out of the spam box, especially when doing cold email outreach is simple.
Only send emails to those who are actually in the market for the services that you provide.
Recipients are much less likely to report your cold emails as spam if they are in line with what they’re looking for in regards to services, or if there’s a previous connection or introduction you can reference in your email.
While organically built lists are not only the most effective when trying to increase the value of your current customers, cold email outreach when sent correctly to targeted prospects can be extremely effective when acquiring new business.
Shady tactics like buying or trading email lists are not only annoying but can be illegal as well.
2. Avoid subject lines with spam trigger words
Email providers have filters built in to detect common spam mail. These filters tend to pick up on common “trigger” words or phrases that most likely mean the email being sent is inauthentic.
Most of the words or phrases contain unrealistic financial promises, or “too good to be true” scenarios.
Here are some of the most commonly flagged phrases:
- Cash bonus
- Serious cash
- Once in a lifetime
- Free consultation
- No strings attached
- What are you waiting for?
- Fast cash now
- Buy direct
- Additional income
- Be your own boss
- Earn $
- While you sleep
- Money making machine
- Potential earnings
- Call now
- Sign up free today
- Online biz opportunity
3. Keep an eye on your spam score
There are a lot of factors that go into determining whether or not your emails will show up in the inbox of your recipients. Some of these factors you can see, some you can’t.
This includes scanning your sender reputation history. What is this you may be asking? Also called your Sender IP Score, this refers to the quality of your email contacts, the engagement your emails typically receive, along with the quality of the content being sent in the emails themselves.
A low sender reputation score will dramatically increase the chances that your emails will be marked for spam. Make sure to regularly check your score from trusted providers like Cisco.
4. Be cautious and aware of frequency of emails
While having a regular conversation with one of your email subscribers through a series of emails in a day won’t seem out of the ordinary, mass sending 3–4 campaigns to the same targeted list in a day definitely will.
Engaging in classic spam behavior like this, especially if the content in the messages are low quality, is one of the fastest ways to get dumped into the spam box and stay there.
5. Consistency, consistency, consistency
With the above said, while spamming your email contacts is not good, being consistent with the campaigns and messages you’re sending is actually very beneficial.
For example, if you typically send messages randomly or at odd times, these are more likely to get flagged as spam as compared to sticking to a consistent schedule, say three emails a week, or once every Sunday.
6. Only publish targeted & relevant content
Perhaps the most helpful thing you can do to prevent your messages from being flagged is taking the time to actually focus on the content that you’re sending to your contacts.
Not surprisingly, the more your contacts enjoy receiving your emails, engage with them, and actually get value out of them, the less likely they are to report your messages as spam.
To stay relevant in the perspective of your subscriber’s inbox, it helps to:
- Use segmentation to divide your larger audience into smaller groups which may prefer receiving different types of content or messages.
- Always be adding value. If you think your contacts wouldn’t be getting anything valuable out of the email you’re about to send, don’t even send it.
- Study your metrics and stick with what works. This is typically the emails that received the most engagements and click through rates.
7. Include Your Company’s Physical Address & Contact Information
Another surefire way to ensure higher deliverability of your emails is to include your company’s physical address and contact information like a phone number at the footer of your messages.
This needs to be done to be in compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act, and more generally just proves that you are indeed a real business.
Conclusion
Achieving a 100% deliverability rate is a tough task for even the most experienced email marketers. However, it can be pretty straightforward to implement tactics like the tips mentioned above to proactively prevent your emails from getting flagged as spam.
After all, the higher your deliverability rate, and the higher of the quality being sent in your emails, the more likely your campaigns are to actually bring in real results and sales instead of fluffed up numbers.
It can be hard to find an email marketing automation software to fit your needs as a marketer, especially when you’re running several campaigns at the same time, and need to keep accurate records of it all.
