Are your emails getting blocked by SPAM filters causing you to miss opportunities to connect with your most ardent fans and make sales?
You aren’t alone.
Read on for tips on how to extract yourself from SPAM hell…
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You have created an amazing email that you want to send out to your mailing lists.
It’s well-crafted and pretty much guaranteed to get you a ton of sales. You press send and are excited to see the orders rolling in, but instead, you hear nothing back. No orders, no responses, nothing.
Crickets.
You reach out to personal connections to see if they have received it and they respond letting you know that the newsletter that you worked so hard on landed in the SPAM folder.
This can be devastating and scary. All of your hard work never got in front of your customers and you are losing opportunities to create strong relationships, share your most valuable information, and make sales.
Are all of your emails landing in SPAM? Have you been blacklisted?
Fortunately, ending up in the SPAM folder isn’t all gloom and doom and does not require you to shut down your domains and start all over. It simply means that you need to make some minor tweaks to ensure that your deliverability stays in good standing.
There are a few different ways to end up in the SPAM folder. Some of the most common reasons include:
- Your open rates and click rates are consistently below industry averages
- You have broken links or too many links in your email
- Your images are too large to be rendered correctly
- Your subject lines sound spammy (BUY NOW!)
- You don’t have an opt-out footer or header available
Content can greatly impact your ability to land in your customer’s inbox. Usually, simple tweaks can prevent this from happening.
However, content is only a part of the equation. Before you start landing in the SPAM folder, here are three things that you can implement today that will ensure consistent email deliverability. Even if you have landed in SPAM before, these 3 steps will help get you back into good standing quickly and easily.
1. Scrub your mailing lists
As Ferris Bueller said, “Life moves pretty fast.”
People are often changing jobs, roles, or careers. This means that even though they are on your list, their email addresses are effectively dead. Email addresses that haven’t engaged with your emails in a long time can impact your deliverability.
Google views a low open rate as SPAM because it assumes that you are sending emails to people who don’t want them rather than being sent to inactive accounts. To scrub your mailing list run a report via your email marketing tool and pull all emails that haven’t interacted with you over a long period of time or email addresses that don’t open your emails.
Run that list through a tool like KICKBOX. This will show you which addresses are still good and which addresses are inactive. Then delete the inactive accounts from your mailing list which will help improve your open and click rates.
2. Verify your email with Google via Postmaster
Google is extremely protective of people’s email accounts and most stringent when it comes to SPAM. Things that may seem trivial can harm your ability to land in the inbox. To ensure deliverability, Google wants to make sure that your domain has good intentions and is protecting your mailing lists inboxes from SPAM-like content.
To prove that, Google has tools that you can register for that will help prove your legitimacy and build trust with their email platform. Google Postmaster is a tool that will allow you to analyze your email deliverability and domain reputation with Google.
You can see if and when you are marked as spam or your online reputation and pinpoint exact dates that these variables change. This is great because you can pinpoint what marketing strategy or campaign may have caused issues and address them before your next email is sent.
3. Measure your engagement
The simplest and easiest way to prevent your emails from landing in the SPAM folder is to ensure that you are measuring the success of your email marketing campaigns. Make sure you are taking the time to look at your open and engagement rates.
You should be seeing a stable open rate in the double digits and a steady click rate above 10%. If these numbers fall dramatically or are consistently lagging, GMAIL and other email services will start to view your sends as SPAM since people aren’t wanting to interact with your content.
Catching a downward trend early can help you to improve your content and ensure active engagements with your emails.
BONUS TIP: The Importance of Opt-In
One of the easiest ways to ensure that you never land in the SPAM folder is to activate an opt-in our double opt-in service in your emails. Your email marketing platform should provide you with the steps to create this.
It is a simple confirmation email or pop-up on your site that allows people to give you permission to send them emails. This permission confirmation is read by Google and is the fastest way to build trust with Gmail and maintain or improve your deliverability into the inbox.
Landing in a SPAM folder can be a scary thing, but it is a totally manageable problem that with a couple of tweaks and a concerted effort, can be resolved very quickly.
If you need some help or questions about SPAM and email marketing, feel free to give us a shout.
