8 Ways To Keep Your Emails From Ending Up In The Trash

Email is one of the best ways to connect with your audience. It’s easy to personalize, there are no character limits and you can easily track which emails are most successful. It’s a great way to tell your customers about a special promotion or announce a new product line.

But nearly 15% of emails never make it to an inbox.

If a large number of your emails are ending up in spam folders or in the trash, you aren’t achieving the best results for your email marketing. It’s going to take a little time and effort, but with a few email marketing best practices, you can build a solid address list with these eight guidelines:

Don’t use a purchased email list.

It takes a while to build a list organically, but it’s far more effective than one you purchase. A purchased list will be littered with invalid addresses, and some digital laws make it illegal to send an email to someone you have never had contact with otherwise.

Instead, use an email subscription as a way to gain access to your white papers or a particularly helpful video. If you provide something of value, you will find that people are willing to exchange an email address for information.

Send emails in small batches.

You should never send emails out in batches larger than 2,000 per send. Email providers flag large batches and automatically send them to spam folders.

Update your bounces and bad emails often.

Remove these from your list so that email providers don’t have any reason to suspect that you’re just throwing emails out there to see what sticks.

Make sure your emails have a clear unsubscribe link.

This is not only good for keeping your emails from spam; it’s also legally required that you include an unsubscribe link. Make it especially valuable for users by including a preferences page that allows them to choose which types of emails they receive. You can also gain valuable information by asking those unsubscribing to mark a reason for their choice.

Have the subscriber add you to their address book.

You can significantly decrease your bounce rate and spam appearances by asking your recipients to add your address as a contact in their address book. This also requires you to send out your emails using a person’s email address instead of info@company.com or a no-reply address.

Send plain text emails.

The more exciting your email is in terms of visuals, the more likely it is to get flagged as spam. A plain text email is more likely to stay in your contact’s inbox.

When sending HTML emails, don’t send big images.

A large image can slow your recipient’s ability to download the image, making it more likely that they’ll ban you to their spam folder.

Avoid spamlish.

These are words or characters that tend to flag you as being an attention-seeker with no value behind your messaging. Avoid using all caps, dollar signs or asterisks, the word “free” or the phrase “guaranteed winner.”

If this list has you questioning whether email marketing is worth the trouble, consider this: HubSpot reports that for every dollar spent, email generates $42 in income. And four out of five marketers say they’d rather give up social media than email marketing. It’s that effective.

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy, unless you have DirectMail.io’s automated marketing platform. This all-in-one solution simplifies email and other types of marketing, allowing you to make connections with potential customers while you’re focusing on your core business. Contact us to learn more.