Tuesday, 18 February 2014

Prevent your Newsletters from going into the Junk folder

Posted by Unknown at 3:10 pm Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
One of the main concerns marketers have, is wondering if their emails are landing in their recipient’s inbox and or junk folder. If the email lands in the junk folder then it immediately reduces the probability of being read to as low as 5% as very few of us will check our junk folder.

In order to prevent this from happening, we have provided our best tips to help you improve your email deliverability.

1. Add your email address as a trusted sender: This will help your email land in your recipient’s inbox as it lets the email client know that you are a trusted sender. As you are noted as a trusted sender, the emails being sent from you will be trusted and therefore have a better chance of being placed into the inbox. 

2. Test your email before sending: Before you launch your email marketing campaigns you need to make sure that your email displays correctly. In order to get the most from your test sends it's best to use the same send details. This means using the same from email, from name and subject line as you will be using for your actual campaign.

3. Use our spam checker tool: This is a helpful tool that will scan your emails content, code and subjectline in order to provide an overall spam score. Once the spam score has been given it will also provide helpful advice on how to reduce the score which will overall reduce the likelihood of your email being labelled as spam.

4. Check your subject line: Avoid using words like “free” or “discount” as they may be classed as spam. Using capital letters and exclamation marks are also considered as spam content.

5. Clean your list frequently: If the recipient server recognises that you send emails to “bad” email addresses, such as non-existing or disabled ones, it might decrease your sending reputation and therefore your emails will be less trustworthy. Additionally when sending to active recipients you will recieve more advantages such as reducing the cost of your sends, easier comparable results and increasing your overall delivery.

6. Reply and deal with your recipient’s complaints and unsubscribing queries as soon as possible. If you do this quickly it will help prevent them from marking your emails as spam.

7. Add text to your newsletter: When sending only images or graphics there is a high probability of being considered spam due to the low ratio of text to images within your email. We also advise that you offer a “text only” version when sending your newsletters. You must also be careful of the links you use within your emails. It is best to show the complete URL, so try and prevent using bit.ly and other shortened links in order to avoid delivery issues. 

8. Set up a SPF record: The SPF (sender policy framework) is a system that validates your emails and can help you preventing your newsletters from being considered spam.

9. Transparent communication: Remember that all your email addresses must be opt-in and therefore if they allowed you to send them information, they also need to have the option to cancel at any point if they no longer want to receive it. Make sure you provide them with the option to unsubscribe in an easy and quick way. Another thing to keep in mind is to display your company name. Your recipients would like to know who they are receiving the newsletters from. This way you will help your newsletter to be recognised and your brand will sound familiar. In addition, you can add personalisation as it will help your customers feel that your company is caring and attentive which can also help you to reduce the number of unsubscribes. Bear in mind that the more consistent your brand is, the less opportunities of being considered spam you have.

10. Avoid sending from your email address to the same email address when testing: by doing this, your newsletter acquires a bigger chance of being considered as spam as you are using the same to and from email address. In addition, we suggest that you send your email marketing campaigns from your company’s domain and not a free domain. For example, sending from example@companyname.co.uk and not from example@yahoo.co.uk when launching your newsletters.

The tips above are the most common reasons for your newsletters being considered as spam, so if you follow our advice it will help reduce the possibility of your newsletters landing in the junk folder. All of these features explained in this blog are available within the advanced features in your GraphicMail account. However, not all of the servers are the same and therefore they might have different anti-spam filtering criteria. 

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