In this article we will provide you with some useful hints to avoid your emails or newsletter campaigns from being mistakingly addressed to the “spam” folders of your clients or contacts.
A Spam email is an email that the email reading and receiving programs (client email) define as unrequested or undesired from their users. For this reason the email marked as spam will automatically be address to the “spam” or “trash bin” folder of the recipient, without having the chance to read it. The receiving programs can consider a mail as spam for different reasons, from content related issues to matters connected to the reputation of the sender.
The suggestions that we will provide you are necessary to try avoiding your emails from being marked as spam by the operators of the companies or by the automatic filters of the different mailbox management applications, but they cannot be considered enough to guarantee you to succeed. The email clients, namely the applications that allow the users to download and visualize the messages from the mail server are in fact continuously developing and they get more and more capable to filter and select the incoming messages: to avoid viruses and unrequested, illegal, and irrelevant emails, or those sent massively to a list of people.
It is tough to understand which are the criteria according to which the anti-spam filters of the client emails work. Very often they sync with each other to share knowledge about what they have learnt. Moreover, ending in the spam folder of a contact affects your future capability of communicating with that contact as being able to lose the spam status is very difficult.
To minimize this risk, we recommend you to follow some general criteria regarding the construction of the database, the design of your campaigns, and how to add contents.
With regards to the contact list we suggest you to:
- build your contact database with care, trying to populate it with real people addresses;
- be sure, according to the GDPR regulation, that all your contacts and clients chose to receive your emails;
- keep you mailing list up-to-date, often removing those addresses that are no longer active or valid and that have stopped receiving/reading your communications (bounce list);
- gather personal email addresses rather than general ones in case of some companies, especially for big ones, as they could have some filters to impede newsletters from reaching their employees.
To minimize the risk that your communication may end up in the spam because of anti-spam filters of the different mail clients, we suggest you to:
- be sure that your emails are sent from a clear and visible email address, linked to a working and dependable mail box;
- avoid emails containing just images, or only links, but instead add the proper quantity of text, to be interrupted with some links and some multimedia content;
- always use test and functioning links, to be always put with their extended URL, never in short because they usually hide potential dangers.
We also suggest you to pay attention to the way in which you fill in the “Object” of your email, so to avoid that it may sound as spam. In particular, you may want to avoid:
- sentences written in capitol letters;
- sentences addressing offers, as: “Save up to 50%” or “Offer”;
- sentences indicating urgency, as: “Order now” or “Limited time”;
- sentences inviting to place an order or spend money, as: “Ask for an estimate”;
- symbols of currencies or sum of money in digits;
- too much punctuation (for instance, too many exclamation points);
- sentences you see way too much as “you won’t believe your eyes” or “the secret that nobody knows”.
Beside these suggestions, it is worth keeping in mind that the setting of an anti-spam filter also pays attention to the actions of the users, as for instances open links and clicks. If a subscriber marks your campaign as spam, the filters will likely not your campaign go through to his inbox again. The best way to avoid such a scenario is to keep a clean public of contact that cannot wait to receive your email campaigns in their inboxes. In particular, we suggest you to:
- design your emails and campaigns to result into something clear and balanced, without getting too far from the contents the recipients expects to receive from your gallery and already connects to your name and to the rest of your communication (website or social network);
- try to engage rather than bore your contact or client;
- avoid including contents that can be assessed as inappropriate for your public;
- try to send your communications as frequently as they should, coherently with your goals.
Lastly, we invite you to use the Send test email of Artshell. In this way you can have a preview of the email that you wish to send to properly check it in all of its parts - from the functioning of the links to the amount and format of the text.