Avoiding the Spam Folder
Orchestrating the most beautiful campaigns will not put a dent in your problem if everything arrives in the “spam folder”. You might not even realise it, but your emails are only as good as your reputation.
Sending out amazing campaigns but yielding no results? How sure are you that your email campaigns actually reach your consumers? In this email we will explore the infamous inbox blackhole called the “spam folder” (and how we can steer our campaigns clear of it).
“But I’m not spam!”
First of all, let’s stop referring to this subject as “Spam”. Spam refers to “unsolicited email sent in bulk”. In this article we will be talking about “Junk mail” instead. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying your email is junk either, but you are most-likely not sending unsolicited emails nor sending email in bulk (as far as you’re aware at least).
Mailbox providers might just be perceiving your email is ‘junk mail’. This means your emails might be arriving, but the problem is that your consumers might not actually be seeing your emails as it disappears in the “junk mail-” or “spam” folder.
“How do I know this is even the issue?”
Well this is simply something you can figure out yourself. Without getting carried away in too much detail, let me briefly point out some methods for finding out how well you’re actually inboxing.
Inbox Seed Test
The best way to check how well you inbox is by simply testing how well you inbox. There are a lot of solutions out there that simply provide you a seed list (list of email addresses) they own from a wide variety of inbox providers. By sending your email to this seed list, these solutions will return exactly where and how (or if) your email arrived in the email inbox or in a spam folder.Template & content testing/scoring
In case you don’t have the luxury to do seed testing, you can always do a check-up on the content you’re sending out as well. There are a lot of analysis tools out there that allow you to analyse your email templates & content and will calculate a ‘Spam score/rating’ for you. Do take these results with a grain of salt though, no one knows exactly based on what Mailbox Providers mark your content as spam.- Sender reputation lookup
You can also check your server’s sender reputation directly. Also these results should be taken with a grain of salt, but a bad sender reputation might be the cause of your deliverability issues, so it might be worth looking into.
“Okay okay.. Indeed, I’m not doing all that well.. What now?”
In case your communication is ending up in a trashcan, rest assured there is plenty you can do to improve this predicament. Let’s run through the most important items you should look at:
1. Guard your Sender reputation
Your sender reputation is the most valuable asset you have as an email marketeer. A bad reputation is the leading cause for your email not reaching the target audience and restoring a bad reputation is a time-consuming process. So how do you avoid your reputation going sour?
a. Don’t buy email list
Buying leads by definition means your leads aren’t engaged with your product, brand or content. This means that sending emails to these leads has the highest risk of being “marked as spam” (which is detrimental to your reputation), not to mention the risk of sending to spam traps and getting blocklisted..
b. Groom your email lists
Make sure you groom your lists. Someone that signed up to your newsletter years ago, but never engaged in any way doesn’t bring any value to the table. Keep sending emails to these unengaged users and at some point you will start to increasingly look more like a spammer (and risk being penalised by end-users as such). Even old leads have the potential to turn into spam-traps, which will get you blocklisted sooner or later.
c. Don’t send too many emails to your end users
This one is probably a no-brainer, but let’s not skip it: don’t send too many emails. It’s annoying. When you’re talking about campaign emails (so not transactional emails) it varies per industry or type of campaigns, but sending between 5-10 emails a month proves most effective in general. Sending more than 5 campaign emails per day is in no way, shape or form acceptable and will get you in trouble.
2. Be compliant
Having to comply with local regulations with your email seems like a straightforward thing, yet still a lot of companies assume this is merely “best practice” or have some other non-legitimate reason for not complying.
It’s actually quite simple though
- Provide a double opt-in to make sure you’re users are a 100% knowingly
- Provide easy unsubscribe options (preferably include a “List-Unsubscribe header” in your emails to allow for 1-click unsubscribing for at least Gmail users)
3. Authenticate your email (with SPF, DKIM, DMARC and BIMI)
Convinced that your content is not to blame? Maybe the server authentication (DKIM, SPF & DMARC) is to blame. Plenty of solutions are readily available to help you check your authentication settings.
4. Provide a notification preferences
In some cases the content you’re pushing isn’t the problem, it might just be the frequency or the various types of notifications a consumer receives. Not all customers are the same after all. Offering the ability to consumers to manage their notification preferences allows for personalization that might just avoid them unsubscribing.
5. Send relevant content
Perhaps the best way to avoid any deliverability issues, is by sending good content to interested subscribers. The more engaged your consumers are with your content, the less likely they are to penalize your brand or content (by marking it as spam).
6. Monitor your engagement metrics
It is vital to always keep monitoring the performance of your campaigns. The engagement of your users plays a vital role in this. Perhaps you didn’t even notice it, but after an extended period of time the type of communication or the communication style might change and not necessarily for the better. A steady decline of the consumer engagement on your campaigns can be a warning sign that your communication might be losing its spark and that your brand is losing touch with its subscribers. From here on out – if left unnoticed or untreated – your once faithful ambassadors might jump ship or worse: start marking you as spam, which puts your precious reputation at risk.
“Well.. this all sounds like a lot of work though”
Changing habits is never easy, but once you spend a little effort you’ll quickly notice a light at the end of the tunnel. In the long term, this is the only way you will ever grow your email marketing into a success.