Tips to Avoid Email Spam Filters in your Email Marketing Campaign

Did you know that email marketing began to be used even before the term ‘Digital Marketing’ was coined? Being one of the oldest techniques for reaching the target customers, email marketing possesses a huge potential for growing the popularity, and ultimately, sales and revenue of a business.

Despite the presence of numerous social media channels as well as web & mobile-based applications, organizations operating at different scales in various industries rely on a precisely designed and tailored email marketing campaign for boosting their profits. However, just like every other business, ISP (Internet Service Provider) and ESP (Email Service Provider) also try to serve the best interests of their clients.

Therefore, even though you have created an email marketing strategy with a genuine intention of making your audience aware of your unique products, exclusive deals, and discount coupons, you might have to face the wrath of the spam filter technology.

What you Should know about Email Spam Filters?

In the world of emails, spam has earned the notorious reputation for compromising the email accounts of the users. So, when your email gets identified as spam by the ISP or ESP of the recipients, it is considered as a black spot on your online promotion plan. Hence, understanding how spam filter technology and the components of the email spam filters work is of utmost importance to every business enterprise that wants to leverage email marketing.

The spam filtering system runs on an algorithm that checks every incoming email against several parameters, such as trigger words, overuse of images, audio or video, and excessive formatting. As per research, around 20% of emails sent with a serious objective by email marketers land in the spam folder of the email account of subscribers.

To make your emails treated as genuine so that they can reach the inbox of your prospective customers, you must pay heed to certain factors which are listed below.

How to Avoid Email Spam Filters Tactfully?

1)Select the ESP and Sender Email Address Wisely

ESPs or email service providers can be classified into respected and not-so-respected based on their existing clients. If ESP has clients whose emails are mostly identified or marked as spam, then its IP address is likely to be blocked by respected ESPs. Choosing such ESP will increase the chances of your emails getting ended up in the spam box.

Similarly, if your email address has been blacklisted by the recipients, the investment made by you in getting the custom email template design built for your email marketing campaign will go in vain. If you had used your email address previously, it’s better to create a new email address. You should start by sending emails to a few recipients and then increase the number of recipients gradually as it signals towards the fact that you are not sending bulk emails.

Moreover, the email address you choose should look personal, which is possible only if you include your name. In case you don’t want to use your name, you can use variables related to your business or products. But, remember to steer clear of email addresses like “noreply@domain.com” or “abc1234@domain.com”.

2)Follow Ethics to Gain the Trust of your Audience

Abiding by anti-spam laws and ethics will work in your favor as you will not only be able to avoid email spam filters but also improve the engagement rate. You should follow the legal regulations at every step of your email marketing campaign from creating an email list to crafting the content. Instead of buying or renting a ready-mail list of email addresses, you should build your own email list from scratch.

Though it is a time-consuming process, creating a group of people who want to read your content will eventually pay off in the terms of improved customer loyalty and retention. Using the ready-made email list for your business involves the risk of hard bounce which results from sending emails to invalid and inactive email addresses. A high bounce rate will be recorded by the ISP as a spam trap hit and harm your sender reputation.

To ensure you send emails only to those subscribers who are interested in receiving your emails, you must opt for a double opt-in method wherein a verification email is sent to the person who has subscribed to your emails. This method will filter out people who have subscribed by mistake. In a verification email, include a sentence requesting your subscribers to add your email address to their address book for avoiding email spam filters.

Last but not the least, never forget to include an unsubscribe link in every email as users who don’t wish to receive emails from you are like a dead weight on your email marketing plan.

3)Concentrate on Subject and Body of your Emails

After checking the ‘from’ field in the email sent by you, email spam filters inspect the subject line carefully. Due to the practice of filling subject lines with bold, capital letters and multiple exclamation marks which was followed earlier, spam filters now consider every mail with such subject lines as spam. An intriguing subject will automatically improve your email open rate even if it is written in lowercase letters.

When it comes to the body of your email, you must keep it short and simple. Don’t commit the mistake of including images, video, audio, forms or JavaScript in your emails. If you want to convey some information using images, audio, video, file attachments or any other form of media, you should include a link redirecting to the same. Emails filled with rich media content and dynamic scripts can alert the email spam filters.

You should make sure to not use any of the spam trigger words, for example, ‘Discount’, ‘Free’, ‘Great Offer’, ‘Lowest Price’, ‘Click Below’, and so on in the subject and body of your emails. Keep consistency in the font size and font color throughout the email as multiple font sizes and colors make the readers think that an email is spammy. A custom email template design, a well-structured email, and grammatically correct content can pave way for the inbox of your target customers.

Conclusion

Though tweets and video sharing make spreading the word about your enterprise and offerings simple and quick, email marketing can never fall out of favor. By keeping the above-mentioned factors in mind, you can execute your email marketing campaign diligently and successfully. Don’t let spam filter technology get in the way of reaching new heights of online success.

You can also consult experts like SparkEmail Design who can provide services for custom email template design by considering the image and voice of your brand. With our knowledge in avoiding spam filters, and proficiency in responsive and HTML email design, you can rest assured that your business will grow by leaps and bounds.