The email inbox is a battleground.
Inboxes are overflowing with messages from friends, family, colleagues, and marketers. And with the average person getting 121 emails per day, it’s more important than ever to make sure your email marketing campaigns don’t end up in people’s spam folders.
We all know about spam folders—those dreaded places where our legitimate emails go to die a slow and painful death. If you’re not careful, your marketing emails could wind up in one of them.
To keep your email marketing messages from ending up in spam folders, there are a few key rules to follow.
Use Confirmed Opt-in Subscriptions
Use confirmed opt-in subscriptions whenever possible. This means that new subscribers must actively confirm their subscription before they start receiving emails from you. It’s a good way to ensure that only those who genuinely want to hear from you will receive your messages.
Confirmed opt-in subscriptions also help ensure that the email addresses on your list are valid and have been given willingly by the subscriber. This helps to reduce the chances of your emails ending up in recipients’ spam folders.
Clean Your Email List Regularly
Email lists tend to get cluttered over time as people unsubscribe, change their email addresses, and so on. This can cause your deliverability rates to drop and increase the chances of your messages ending up in spam folders. That’s why it’s important to clean your list regularly–at least every quarter.
This process can be done either manually or with an automated tool. As previously mentioned, an opt-in subscription can also help with cleaning your email list, as it makes sure that the people you’re sending your emails to are still active and actually want to receive news from you.
Use A Relevant Subject Line
Your email’s subject line is your first and best chance to get your recipient’s attention. Make sure it both accurately reflects the content of your email and is eye-catching. An interesting or attention-grabbing subject line is great, but if it has nothing to do with the contents of your email, your subscribers may mark it as spam.
Your subject line should also be appropriate for the message you’re sending. Avoid spammy words like “free,” “sale,” and “urgent.”
Also, make sure your subject line is relevant to the recipient. If they don’t know what you sell or what the email is about, there’s a good chance it will end up in their spam folder.
Personalize The Message
To ensure your email doesn’t wind up in a spam folder, personalize the message. This means including the recipient’s name and addressing them directly. Generic messages tend to get flagged as spam more easily than those that are personalized.
Use their first name in the greeting and try to reference something you know about them. If you can’t personalize every email, try to at least make sure that the most important messages are.
Format Your Email Properly
Your email should be formatted in a way that is easy to read. This means using a standard font like Arial or Times New Roman, and avoiding excessive use of capital letters, underlining images, and other formatting tricks.
You should also stick to a single-column layout to make it easy for readers to scan. Doing this also ensures that your email is mobile-friendly!
Ask Your Subscribers to Whitelist Your Email
Sometimes, even after following every step to avoid your email campaigns going to spam, some of your subscribers may still find them landing in their junk folders. To combat this, you can ask your subscribers to whitelist your email address so they can receive your messages without any issues.
Having your email address whitelisted by your subscribers means that your emails will always make it to their inboxes and will bypass any spam filters that might have prevented it from arriving in the first place. If you’re planning to do this step, a good option is to include instructions for whitelisting in your welcome email. That way, they will know exactly what to do from the get-go.
Proofread Your Emails Before Sending
One of the biggest mistakes people make with email marketing is not proofreading their emails before sending them. Typos and errors can make your email appear unprofessional and end up in spam folders or flagged by spam filters. Conversely, a well-written, error-free email is more likely to be seen as legitimate by recipients’ email servers.
Use an Appropriate Sender Address
When you’re sending an email campaign, it’s important to use a sender address that looks reputable and trustworthy. This means using a domain name that’s associated with your company rather than a free webmail account like Gmail or Yahoo.
Also, make sure to avoid using dodgy-sounding sender addresses that contain spam, special characters, or numbers. You wouldn’t want your subscribers to think that your email is coming from a bot with malicious intent.
Make It Easy For Subscribers to Opt-Out
Your subscribers should always have an easy way to unsubscribe from your emails. This is especially important if you’re sending out content that could be considered spammy. If people feel like they can’t easily opt-out of your emails, they may just mark them as spam instead.
Place an unsubscribe link in every email and make it easily accessible. This will help keep your messages out of people’s spam folders and protect your sender-reputation.
Try to Limit your Email Frequency
One of the quickest ways to end up in someone’s spam folder is by sending them too many emails. Most people have email filters set up that will automatically put any message from a user who sends more than one email a day straight to their spam folder.
There are some exceptions to this rule, such as if you’re sending an automated drip campaign with different messages going out on different days. But for the most part, it’s best to try and limit your frequency to 1-2 emails per week.
Final Thoughts
Email marketing is still a powerful way to reach customers, but only if they’re actually receiving your messages.
Make sure your subject lines are catchy, your content is valuable, and you’re not abusing subscribers’ trust by sending too many emails. Following these simple tips will help ensure that your email marketing campaigns successfully reach their target audience.
