One of the biggest complaints about sending regular emails is that they go straight to the spam folder. Your emails landing in the spam folder means your open rates are lower and your clients aren’t getting valuable information they need to solve their problems.
To be honest, most emails do get through. Around 80 per cent of emails will go to your inbox. But what about those 20 per cent? If yours is one of them it kinda sucks.
Here are some ways to reduce the risk of ending up in the spam folder, and send emails that get to your clients.
Why you might end up in spam folders
So the first thing we need to make sure of is that our carefully crafted email isn’t heading straight to the email spam folder.
Your email may be going to spam for a number of reasons, but here are the most common, and relevant to small business owners.
Your email list has a low open rate. This matters because it shows your list isn’t engaged. The best fix for this is making sure you’re sending your email list content that they love! Check out this report from Campaign Monitor which tells you about bench mark email open rates according to industry and day sent. Overall, 18% of email campaigns are opened, and click through rates 2.6%. For wellness and fitness, the average email open rate is 21.6%.
You’ve got old email addresses on your email list. How many email addresses do you have? And how many do you actually hop into each week? If you’ve got email addresses on your email list that aren’t being used (they’re inactive) it can affect your deliverability. That’s why regularly cleaning up your email list (more on that shortly) is a great idea.
You’re using spam trigger words in your subject line. Such as, click here, congratulations, cancel at any time, order now, promise, this is not spam, win
Never buy an email list. Make sure your list is YOURS. This helps engagement (people know you) and therefore open rate, which in turn helps reduce your spam folder locations!
How not to end up in spam folders
Here are some useful checks to minimise the risk of being labelled as spam!
Use a double-opt in when someone signs up to your list. This is also great practice for maintaining privacy standards. Most email providers (Mail Chimp, Mailerlite, Active Campaign etc) will provide you with a double-opt in tick box when creating a landing page that people can use to sign up for your list.
Not got a lead magnet? Check out this blog on how to build your email list with a newsletter sign up.
Have a business email address (e.g. kat@wordsforwellness.com) rather than just a plain @gmail.com/ @xtra.co.nz etc email address.
Authenticate your email address. Okay, so this is the technical bit, but it doesn’t have to be! Hopefully you’re making life easy for yourself and have signed up to Mailer Lite, Mail Chimp, Active Campaign etc for your email platform. In which case, when you signed up they will have had you authenticate your email address as part of the process. Just head to your settings and make sure. Here’s the video of how to authenticate your emails in Mailer Lite (my favourite email platform) Not on Mailer Lite? Just Google the instructions for your own provider.
Regularly clean up your email list. More on how to do this later, but having people on your email list who aren’t engaged (opening your emails) means your open rates will be lower which means you’re more likely to be flagged as spam. Cleaning up your email list can also save you money. Many email providers have price bands depending on the number of subscribers. Why pay to send emails to 7000 people when only 3000 are engaged?
Send great value content. That your tribe wants to read! So they open it, and engage with it!
Check your email with a spam tester. When you write your email in one of many email platforms, you have the option to send a test email. I will often send mine to Mail Tester which checks the spammyness of your emails!
Re-engaging an unengaged email list
As I’ve said, it’s a good idea to clean up your email list and re-engage people who may be avoiding you.
To clean up your list you could just segment all your list who hasn’t opened an email in the past 3-6 months and hit ‘delete’.
But it’s quite nice to give them the option to get back on board with you.
Sending a very short email sequence to re-engage them is a great way to touch-base with your email list and give them a chance before getting rid of them.