By following a few key principles when building your email broadcasts, you can improve your email deliverability, build trust with your subscribers and achieve better results from your email marketing campaigns.
A quick internet search will provide hundreds of articles helping you design your email broadcasts and optimise the content to avoid spam filters. Here are a few of our tips.
1. Maintain a quality email list
Only collect email addresses from people who have explicitly given you permission to do so.
Avoid purchasing email lists or using third-party data sources, as they often contain outdated or inactive email addresses. That can trigger spam filters for your entire email audience.
Over time, some contacts may stop engaging (opening or clicking) with your emails. For each contact who has not engaged with your emails for more than X months (depending on how frequently you email), attempt to re-engage them with a simple, polite but engaging email. If those contacts fail to engage with that email, stop emailing them.
2. Configure DKIM, SPF and DMARC and use a personalised and consistent sender name
DKIM, SPF and DMARC are essentially records added to your domain settings that increases the security of your domain and increases your email reputation in your recipient’s email servers. When implementing email marketing solutions for our clients, we do all that leg work.
Using a consistent sender name and email address can help improve your email deliverability. Make sure that your sender name is recognisable and relevant to your brand or business.
3. Use Double Opt In processes
When a subscriber subscribes to your mailing list, automate a request for the contact to confirm their email address via the appropriate link in your email marketing solution. This gives two benefits.
First, it builds email reputation between you and your new contact as their email address is confirmed.
Second, the new contact is likely to receive that email immediately and open the email (and hopefully click to confirm their email address) as they are on their computer or device right at that moment. This immediate engagement with your email aids your email reputation.
4. Craft engaging and relevant subject lines
The subject line is the first thing that subscribers see when they receive your email. It can determine whether they open it or not.
Make sure that your subject lines are engaging, specific and not misleading. Avoid using promotional language, excessive punctuation and emojis. They are common triggers for spam filters.
5. Avoid spammy wording
The content of your email can also impact whether it ends up in the spam folder or not.
Avoid using spam trigger words or phrases, such as “free”, “act now”, “earn money”, “work from home”, “download”, “buy now”, “click here”, “investment”. Avoid dollar amounts too. Some email programs (such as the one we implement for clients, Keap) provide spam warnings as you are drafting your emails. Take note of these warnings.
6. Optimise your email calls to action (CTA) and links
Include a clear call-to-action (CTA) that encourages subscribers to take action. However, don’t overload your email with too many CTAs or links. Keep your total links in an email to under five.
This includes button links, image links, video links, word/phrase links and social media links. Too many links can attract the attention of spam filters which actually click those links to ‘test’ them for authenticity.
Wherever possible, link to your own website (your own domain that matches the domain of your email address) and avoid linking to short URLs such as bit.ly etc.
7. Optimise your email design
Use a clear and concise writing style, with no excessive formatting, font or colour changes.
A multi-coloured background should be used sparingly. They can be appealing in the right circumstances for the right promotions, but ensure your engagement (open and click) rates are already strong before adding pizazz to your emails.
If your email contains a high percentage of text, left align the email. Centre-aligned emails can be more visually appealing, especially if images are included. So mix it up a little over time and monitor the results.
Similarly, minimise the number of images in your emails. Perhaps four or five at most, and keep the image sizes manageable (no bigger than 600px x 600px and no larger than 1mb).
Good email marketing tools like the one we implement for clients (Keap) offer A/B split testing features. This is a process where you can create two versions of the same email, with subtle differences, then measure the open and click rates on each of the two versions. This is a great way to learn what email content works best, and perhaps what may affect your results.
8. Optimise for mobile
A majority of your email recipients will be reviewing your emails on their mobile. A non-responsive layout will likely reduce the likelihood of your audience ‘consuming’ your content – and that affects future email deliverability.
Good email marketing tools like the one we implement for clients (Keap), guarantees a mobile responsive layout.
9. Personalise your email content
Personalise your email greeting. Where you have First Names in your database, use them in your email. Such as “Hi {First Name}”.
Even more importantly, personalise the content. Ensure you have a useful Email Preference Centre where each of your subscribers can choose what types of email contact they wish to receive, or not receive. Emailing content that contacts do not want to receive is the biggest risk to your email marketing.
10. Optimise email frequency
Email service providers are getting smarter and more strict when determining whether your email is spam or not. One of the criteria they use is email frequency.
Emailing infrequently will be a red flag to your recipient’s spam filters. You may find that if you don’t email for two or three months, your emails may stop being placed into inboxes (or worse, may be blocked).
However, emailing too frequently is also a big problem. We recommend aiming for between three and eight emails to each contact (on average), per month. Good email marketing tools like the one we implement for clients (Keap), provide the monitor tools for you to optimise this frequency.
Spam filters are changing all the time. We constantly learn and provide advice for our clients to get the best out of their email marketing solutions.
Contact us to learn about the CRM, Sales and Email Marketing Automation solution we implement for clients in the thoroughbred industry.