How do you keep your email out of the spam folder?
You put real effort into it — thought hard, wrote carefully, produced a beautiful and genuinely valuable email. You hit Send, excited and expectant, and wait for a reply. And wait. And nothing comes, because your email was misread as spam and disappeared. Worse still, your address picks up a black mark, gets classified as a possible spam sender and put under watch, which then affects your company’s ordinary mail reaching its recipients too.
Overseas figures suggest roughly one in four emails sent (25%) ends up in a spam folder. Of course, the internet has plenty of defenders whose job is security and customer privacy, and we should respect customers and follow the law.
That said, in most cases the emails you send are welcome. Watch these five points and your email will be a benefit to your customers rather than a nuisance:
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Personalise it. Show the recipient’s name and the sender’s name. For a company address, try to avoid words like “marketing” or “sales” in the sender.
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Avoid marketing vocabulary in the subject line: discount, earn more, free, money-making opportunity, act now, and so on. These can appear in the body — just keep them out of the subject. The principle is simple: the subject should be honest and not overblown.
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Do not use too many exclamation marks. Spam filters are surprisingly sensitive to them.
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Do not attach files. Spam filters are equally sensitive to attachments. A hyperlink to further reading is a better choice.
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Get the text-to-image ratio right. A hundred words to one image is a good rule of thumb — and your email should not run long. Choose the right format for the content you are carrying. Also avoid coloured text in the body.
All five of these are easy to do. Try them and see what happens to your results.