Have you ever poured your heart and soul into crafting the perfect email, only to discover that it ended up in your recipients’ spam folders? It’s beyond frustrating, isn’t it?
Fear not, as I will unveil eight industry secrets that will rescue your emails from the dreaded spam folder and improve your email deliverability game.
Prefer video tutorials? Watch it here:
1. Use custom email domain
Please don’t use free email clients like Gmail or Outlook for your business. It just looks so spammy.
Personally, I don’t even open business emails that come from Gmail. They go directly to spam. And I still get a lot of them. Free services like these are not designed to send thousands of emails. So they get flagged as spam quicker.
2. Nurturing Email Reputation for Better Delivery
Second, think about email reputation. Use a reputable ESP so email service provider. For example, Flodesk, MailerLite, and ConvertKit. These providers have a strong reputation with internet service providers and email clients, which helps ensure your emails are delivered to your subscribers’ inboxes. They also provide advanced features like spam filters, bounce handling, and email list management.
On the other hand, your domain name can impact your email reputation. If you’re using a custom domain name for your email campaigns, it’s important to maintain a good reputation for that domain to avoid being flagged as spam. If enough people flag you as spam, you are in trouble.
To maintain a good email reputation for your domain, it’s important to follow best practices such as:
- Sending relevant and engaging content,
- Avoiding spam trigger words in your email subject lines and content
- and only sending emails to subscribers who have opted in to receive them
(Don’t buy email lists or trick people to signup)
3. Build a high-quality email list
And that takes us nicely to the next tip, build a high-quality email list. You want subscribers genuinely interested in your content and not just signing up for some unrelated freebie.
Offer something of value to your subscribers, like a discount or a free guide, to attract the right people to your list. This way, you’ll have engaged subscribers who are more likely to open and interact with your emails.
However, if you notice some people are not engaging with your emails, don’t be afraid to remove them. You can set it as automation. For example, if a subscriber hasn’t opened or clicked on anything in the last ten emails. Then unsubscribe them.
It sounds counterproductive, but you want only engaged people on the list. Otherwise, you are just paying for them for no reason, and they are lowering your open and click-through rates, which impacts deliverability.
Email Verification Services also help you clean up your email list and remove invalid or inactive email addresses that can harm your email deliverability. Some popular email verification services include ZeroBounce, BriteVerify, and NeverBounce.
More about email verification services
4. Email double opt-in
Another thing you can do to improve your email deliverability is to use a double opt-in. This means that when someone signs up for your list, they have to confirm their email address before they start receiving your emails. This helps ensure that you have a clean and engaged list, and reduces the chances of your emails being marked as spam.
For example, the confirmation email might say something simple like
“Thanks for signing up! Please click the link below to confirm your subscription.”
Or here is a bit more creative way that Ben’s Bites does it, you need to reply to the email with “Oi”.
This is genius! Because it confirms the subscription and the email clients see that people reply to this email, so it must be genuine. And it will be less likely to go to the spam or promotions tab.
6. Avoid Spam Trigger Words and Phrases
The fifth tip is to avoid spam trigger words and phrases: Certain words and phrases can trigger spam filters and cause your emails to be flagged as spam.
Examples of this is words like
- “Free”
- “buy now”
- “limited time offer”
- “guaranteed”
And here is a great resource by Active Campaigns to dive deeper into this topic.
It doesn’t mean you can’t use these words, but use them carefully and not in every email. If you have a strong reputation and drop these occasionally, it won’t be a problem.
The cool thing is that tools can check if your email sounds spammy.
Tools like Mail Tester and GlockApps can help you test your emails for spam triggers before you send them out. These tools analyze your email content and give you a spam score and suggestions on improving your email.
Most email marketing tools enable you to use Authentication protocols like
- DKIM
- SPF
- DMARC
all these sound like gibberish to most of you, myself included.
But they can help you improve your email deliverability by verifying that your emails come from a trusted source.
Here is a great infographic that shows what each does in summary. You can see that the first 2 are must-haves and DMARC is highly recommended, but I think this is only really needed when you have thousands of emails going out weekly.
Your email marketing tool should have instructions on how to add these authentications.
7. Warm Up Your Email Campaigns
This tip is advanced. Email warm-up sounds weird. Why would email need to warm up? But this is a process to build trust with ESPs, so email service providers like Gmail.
You start by sending a few emails and gradually increase the volume over several weeks or months, depending on your email list size and engagement rates. This helps ESPs recognize your sending patterns, improving your email deliverability rates.
Now, if you just started with email marketing and have a small list, this is not a real problem for you. But if you are starting a new email marketing campaign and have a big list with thousands of emails you imported from somewhere, you need a warmup.
Also, If you have changed the email domain, you’ll need to warm up your new environment to establish credibility with ESPs and avoid being flagged as spam. The same goes for reactivating a dormant email account.
8. Write Irresistible Subject Lines
The last tip is to write catchy subject lines to get opens and engagement. ESPs track the open, click and reply rates. If this is high, it signals that the email is legit.
Remember, getting your emails into your subscribers’ inboxes is essential, but to really make an impact, you need to have email subject lines that grab readers’ attention and make them want to read more and reply. Otherwise, all the hard work you put into writing the email will go unnoticed.
Writing headlines is easier said than done, that’s why you should read more about how to craft your subject lines for higher open rates.
