Email Marketing: How to avoid spam filters and land in the inbox

Email Marketing is a subject we have covered here many times before but today we are confronting something that is often neglected!
And that is – the Junk Folder and how to avoid it!

You see, email marketing can be so unfair at times!

You spend hours, sometimes days, creating and fine-tuning a blog post.

When you’re done, you’re pretty confident that you’ve come up with a killer piece of content.

You hit ‘publish’ and post a link to your article up on social media.

Then, as a serious and savvy blogger, you email your mailing list to promote all your hard work.

But in the next few days, the silence is deafening.

You start to feel underwhelmed and discouraged.

After all, you didn’t sweat blood and tears for a small spike in your website traffic and a few measly retweets, right?

The panic starts setting in. Your email analytics are showing some pretty dismal open rates.

You wonder whether your post was actually that good in the first place.

Or worse still, maybe you start to worry that you’re not cut out to be a blogger after all.

The worrying truth about Email Marketing

Well, hold on a sec.

The problem might not actually be with your content.

Maybe the issue is with your emails… and how spam filters see them.

We all know that content promotion is hugely important these days.

However, when it comes to emailing blog subscribers, we face 2 huge obstacles.

Firstly, having your emails land in a recipient’s junk folder is a really common problem.

Getting junked is arguably the most serious issue you face as a content marketer.

According to ReturnPath, only 81% of commercial emails actually reach an inbox.

When you consider that there are over 100 billion emails are sent and received every day, we’re talking about LOADS of unseen outreach (and untapped value].

The second problem we face is slightly more obvious.

The daily bombardment of emails makes it much harder for the outreach messages that actually do get delivered correctly to get noticed.

However, with both these problems, help is at hand.

The good news is that both issues are related and we can kill two birds with one stone.

With a few small tweaks to your outreach strategy, we can fix this and have you reaping the rewards that your epic efforts deserve.

That sounds more like it, doesn’t it?

The big, unseen barrier to the growth of your blog

You probably know how the whole email thing works.

We all have email, and every email service provider has a built-in spam filter to determine the credibility of each message that we receive.

When an email is sent to us, these email filters analyse a bunch of different factors.

Each factor results in a certain amount of points being scored.

Quite simply, the worse your email measures up against the filter’s criteria, the higher the amount of points it scores for each factor.

If the overall points total is too high then forget about it: the email is sent to the junk folder.

Now, it should be said that although email service providers are legally obliged to use spam filters, they’re also there to improve our email experience.

And I guess we should be grateful that spam filters do exist, otherwise we’d be constantly bombarded with daily emails hawking penis enlargement pills, get–rich–quick schemes and singles in your area!

So email filters can wreak havoc with an email marketing campaign, but they’re forcing companies to become more credible.

How to beat the email filters (and boost your blogging ROI)

So the million-dollar question is, what do email filters care about?

Email filters look at a range of technical and content-related things.

You shouldn’t have to worry about the technical stuff, especially if you’re using one of the common email service providers – the likes of MailChimp and AWeber won’t let you down.

Fact is, most emails are labeled as junk because of the content they contain.

Content-related triggers can be obvious or subtle, intentional or unintentional.

11 Email Marketing Tips

Follow this guide to craft the perfect outreach email that will reach your subscriber every time…

1. Take responsibility for your domain.

My first piece of advice is nice and simple: get your domain whitelisted.

You do this by getting a certificate from an authorised source.

Becoming white listed is a way of putting your hand up and saying that you’re responsible for your domain.

And email filters trust these certificates implicitly.

It’s a straightforward process; you just need to find a provider and apply. Certificates aren’t free, but they’re pretty cheap.

For a suggested certificate provider, I’d recommend EmailReg.

You just create an account and submit your domain.

They’ll then do some digging.

Assuming you’re legit, they’ll then sort everything out. A certificate with EmailReg costs $20 and lasts a lifetime.

It’s a total no-brainer; we’re talking about a 5-minute job that you’ll never have to do again.

You will find varying opinions about services like EmailReg online — All I can say is it works for me. I guess some people don’t like paying the $20.

We will discuss WhiteListing later in this post but if you suspect you have been Blacklisted – here is a guide on how to get removed from Email Blacklist.

One other thing – when selecting a domain name, always consider if any of the words used in the domain name are considered ‘spammy’ and likely to set of a spam filter (It has been known to happen)

Finally on this subject here is a rather large list of Email SPAM Trigger Words

Of course issues like this are one of the main reasons Email Marketers end up using Email Services such as Aweber.

2. Avoid using any bizarre email addresses

If there’s one thing that email filters love, it’s an email coming from a source with a clear and consistent brand identity.

Yahoo! mail is particularly well known for paying attention to the ‘from’ field addresses.

When picking your ‘from’ address, stay away from obscure names like ‘werfergere@domain.com’.

Instead, use clear, trustworthy terms like:

contact@

support@

hello@

[your name]@

Also, try not to ever change your address unless you really have to. Consistency is key.

3. Steer clear of any words with a potentially negative context.

Make sure that both the title and the content of your email are written well.

Also, watch out for spelling mistakes:

Remember I mentioned credibility earlier?

Well, one of the biggest culprits for triggering filters is the use of spammy words in your email.

Here is another list of words to avoid in email by Pardot but, in the main, it’s fairly common sense stuff.

For example, avoid phrases like ‘bonus gift’, ‘free prizes’ or ‘don’t delete’.

Got a word you’re not sure about? Then consider how you’d feel if you received an email with it.

Would you think it’s spammy?

Trust your gut. That’ll be the clincher.

A well respected finance guru here in the UK, is Martin Lewis from MoneySavingExpert.com

Mr Lewis is a perfectly credible email source – and at some stage in the past I signed up for his newsletter.

However that didn’t stop his latest email ending up in my junk folder.

Here was the title of the email:

It’s trying to say far too much.

Not only that, but it uses abbreviations and appears like a random collection of words.

This is like email junk bingo.

We’ve got ‘urgent’, ‘cheap’ (twice) and ‘£££’.

It would have been better if the title had used a ‘pipe’ symbol (aka vertical bar) as in example below: