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.
Email service providers like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft (Outlook, Hotmail) significantly upped their fight against email spam in the past 18 months. This has presented significant challenges for legitimate email senders.
When implementing and managing email marketing and automation solutions for clients in the thoroughbred industry, we are constantly learning and sharing our knowledge. Here are a few of our tips to maximise email marketing effectiveness.
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Avoid purchasing email lists or using third-party data sources, as they often contain outdated or inactive email addresses.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 weeks (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. Properly authenticate your email marketing platform
To allow your email marketing platform to send emails from your chosen email address(es) on your domain, configure DKIM, DMARC and possibly SPF records on your domain.
These are essentially records added to your domain settings that increase the security of your domain and increase your email reputation in your recipient’s email servers. When implementing email marketing solutions for our clients, we do all that legwork. You don’t even need to understand what they mean!
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, 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.
Second, most email marketing solutions (like the one we implement for clients, Keap) will send emails to confirmed email addresses from a more secure IP address compared to the emails sent to unconfirmed email addresses. This increases the likelihood of your emails landing in your contact’s inbox.
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”, and “investment”. Avoid dollar amounts too. It’s a long list!
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 – maybe five at most.
Too many button links, image links, video links, text hyperlinks and social media links can draw the attention of spam filters, which may click on those links to ‘test’ their authenticity.
Wherever possible, link to your website, ensuring that the domain matches the one used in your email address. It is advisable to avoid using shortened links, such as those from bit.ly or YouTube, as they can appear suspicious to recipients and spam filters.
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.
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 600kb).
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 helps you 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 is likely to diminish the chances of your audience engaging with your content, which could negatively impact future email deliverability.
Good email marketing tools guarantee 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}”.
Ensure that you provide a comprehensive email preference centre, allowing each subscriber to select the types of email communications they wish to receive or opt out of. 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 four and eight emails to each contact (on average), per month. Effective email marketing tools, such as Keap, which we utilise for our clients, offer monitoring capabilities that allow you to optimise your email 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.