Email marketing is one of the most lucrative tools for businesses trying to connect with their customers. It allows you to connect with the right customer at the right time with the right message. However, it’s not an easy job. On average, marketers spend around 20 hours per week on email campaigns that they manage manually. They first have to plan out the campaigns, get the email design and content ready, and then send it out to each name of their list. Sounds cumbersome, right?

Did you know that nearly one-fifth of the emails that are sent to you never really reach you? According to Return Path’s 2017 Email Deliverability Benchmark Report, 20 percent of email never reaches the inbox. So, where do these emails end up? The spam folder.

While the spam filter saves people from a lot of email frauds, it is the arch-nemesis of all marketers. Theoretically speaking, 1 out of every 5 marketing emails you send, might just end up in spam folder. That being said, it’s not impossible to make it to people’s inboxes. Here are some tried and tested hacks that can help you steer clear of the spam folder while sending out your marketing emails.

#5 Best Practices to Avoid The Spam Folder For Your Marketing Emails

1. Clickbait no longer works: Avoid misleading subject lines

Traditionally, marketers played with the email subject lines to evoke curiosity and get people to click on their emails. But gone are the days when marketers preached hacks like adding “Re:” or “Fwd:” “Free” to your email subject lines. Now, you talk to an aware audience that not only avoids your gimmicks but also actively reports them.

Using overhyped subject lines that don’t match the contents of your email may get you a higher open rate, but it will also get you much higher customer dissatisfaction. They’d not only unsubscribe to your email but can also report your emails for phishing or spam, thereby getting you blacklisted.

The key is to keep your subject lines crisp and engaging, but not deceptive. So, avoiding phrases like “free gifts”, “exclusive offers”, “claim the prize”, etc is a good start.

2. Reputation matters: Work on your IP credibility

Statista reports that spam messages account for 53.95 percent of e-mail traffic in March 2020. That is more than half of the emails sent out worldwide. So, falling in this lot is rather common for a marketing email. Your emails have to clear two checkpoints: ISP gateway and Spam Filter and can get blocked at either of these junctions.

To get clearance at these checkpoints you need to ensure that the IP address from which the emails are being sent out has a good reputation. Building your IP reputation can be tricky because a single wrong step can cost you your IP credibility. To avoid that from happening, here are a few steps that you can take:

• Start Small: Send out emails to a handful of audience. For starters, always send out emails to an audience that is aware of your brand and is likely to check your email or better still, respond to it. This helps ISPs in knowing that your emails are relevant.
• Send Emails to Subscribers: When a person subscribes to your content, they permit you to send email communication to them. So, always send emails to your subscribers and not random lists that you may have procured from third-party sources. Ideally, Ideally, use double opt-in or confirmed opt-in for the subscription.
• Separate marketing and transactional emails: Marketing emails are sent to a group of customers or prospects to nudge them towards taking some action towards your brand. On the contrary, transaction emails are sent to individuals helping them in completing a transaction or a process related to your product or service. An individual is usually expecting the transaction email and is likely to act upon it. When you mix these with your marketing emails, your customer gets disoriented and can unsubscribe from your mailing list. So, you keep the communication for marketing and transaction totally separate.
• Keep tabs on your IP reputation: It is always good to monitor your efforts. While you keep building your IP credibility, you should use tools like Senderscore.org, TrustedSource, to know your IP reputation. You can also use get your IP certified via Sender Score to ensure that your emails reach the inbox through most of the major ISPs out there.

4. Balance is the key: Set the right email frequency

Too much and too little of anything is always harmful. If you said too many emails to a person, you might annoy them into unsubscribing you or reporting you as spam. If you barely send them an email, our prospect or customer is likely to forget about you.

Setting an adequate email frequency is crucial to the deliverability of your email. The key is to not overwhelm them but to keep them connected to your brand. Ideally, you should send one email per week. If you have a special offer to make, you might add another email, but you should not send more than two marketing emails to one person in the same week.

5. Content is the king: Keep email content in check

Last but definitely not the least, is working on the content of your email. Your message must be absolutely relevant to the receiver. A good practice is to always focus on what your receiver would like to know about your brand, instead of what you’d want to tell them.

Certain technical details like keeping the text to image ratio as 4:1, adding all tags to images, making emails mobile-responsive are also crucial in building your brand and IP reputation. You can refer to our guide on writing a good marketing email to help you with this.

In the End

You would find a lot of articles dealing with what goes inside a marketing email, but it’s equally important to take care of the technicalities of email delivery. The best of email copies fail to deliver results if they end up in the spam folder. An ESP can help you tackle a lot of these problems, especially for building your IP credibility and cleaning your mailing lists. You can check out our article about comprehensive guide on B2B email marketing or ESP to learn more about it.