The last place you want to see your emails is in the spam folder. Deliverability becomes a critical element of a successful email marketing campaign. Take the following steps to help ensure your email gets to whom you are sending it to:
Check Your Copy for Spam-Triggering Words
Make sure your subject line and body of email don’t include any keywords that can trigger spam alerts. Some Email Service Providers (ESPs) help you identify these phrases with features such as Content Detective, SpamAssassin and ContentChecker. Avoid spam-triggering words is to keep your emails out of the box.
Suppress Against Hard Bounces
Are you keeping track of the percentage of hard bounces you get? You need to be. If that number is rising, bring it up with your ESP. Since hard bounced can really hurt your reputation, you will have to clean your list regularly.
Increase Engagement Levels
Mail clients have started tying the engagement levels of your email subscribers to your reputation as a sender. In response to this, you will need to keep your recipients highly engaged in order to appear reputable in the eyes of Gmail, AOL, Yahoo, etc. Do your recipients click on emails or do they delete them? Do they mark them as spam? What action do they take?
Set Expectations in the Welcome Email
Greet the newcomers when they sign up for your newsletter or other types of email communication. In the welcome email, set some expectations explaining why that person is receiving your messages, how often they are going to be sent out and from whom exactly. These details will help you build a relationship that goes a long way.
Don’t Forget Branding
Branding is vital to how emails are being read and how recipients understand them. It helps people make the connection and say, “This is the real thing, not just a third-party email.”
Use a Preference Center
If a recipient wants to update her email address, does she have an easy way to do that? Provide her/him with a preference center, in which s/he can make that selection and tell you what the best email is to be contacted at.
Track Your Complaint Feedback Loop
You are probably tracking hard bounces and soft bounces. But do you know how many people clicked on the “This Is Spam” button? First, look into that and understand how many of these complaints you are getting. Remove the subscribers who have complained.