Designing a compelling template is only part of a successful email campaign. No matter how carefully you craft an email, if it doesn’t reach your recipients, the campaign is ineffectual.
Email providers use complex and ever-changing criteria to filter spam, but there are a number of considerations that can help make sure your campaign emails land where they should – in your contacts’ inboxes.
Email Content
The first part of a successful email campaign is to craft an email template that is engaging but does not contain features that would cause it to be labeled as spam. See Email Template Tips for more.
Engagement
Consistently sending emails with low open and click rates will negatively impact your domain reputation and negatively impact future campaigns. Here are a few actions that can help boost engagement:
- Create targeted recipient lists instead of regularly sending campaigns to your entire database – if you send an email to 100 people and 50 people open it, your open rate is 50%, but if you send an email to 1000 people, those same 50 people will give you an open rate of only 5%. Your email reaches the same number of interested people, but the lower open rate damages your sending reputation.
- Use interesting subject lines - but avoid all caps, spam trigger words and punctuation marks.
- Use a recognized sender such as your project name so recipients know your email is coming from a legitimate source. If you can, use a person’s name; an email from Jane Doe from Your Project is generally more likely to be opened than one from Sales at Your Project.
Bounce Rates
A high bounce rate will hurt your domain reputation and decrease overall deliverability. A soft bounce indicates an email that has temporarily failed, usually due to a problem with the recipient’s domain. A hard bounce indicates an email that has failed permanently.
The best way to reduce bounce rates is to perform database maintenance on a regular basis. Spark automatically suppresses emails to addresses that have previously experienced a hard bounce, but a higher soft bounce rate can also indicate a list that needs to be cleaned. Consider creating a group of contacts to exclude from email campaigns.
Email Lists
Even if your entire email list is composed of valid registrants who have explicitly opted in to receiving emails from you, it is important to practice good email hygiene in order to maintain a good sender reputation. Regularly perform maintenance to keep your email list current and clean.
- Even if an email is valid, the inbox may consistently be full because it is no longer being monitored, leading to a soft bounce. Worse, an abandoned, inactive email address may also become a spam trap (an email address used by service providers to lure and block spammers).
- If your database is on the older side, it could contain contacts that registered months or even years ago and are no longer interested in the project or who are not receiving your emails for another reason. These contacts tend to have a lower engagement rate and are more likely to report your email to their provider as spam, which will negatively impact your reputation.
As part of your regular list maintenance, consider sending an engagement email to contacts who have experienced a soft bounce or who have not been recently interacted with and add any who do not opt-in to your exclusion group.
Spam
There are a number of reasons an email might end up caught by modern spam filters and unfortunately it is impossible to avoid them all. There are, however, a number of best practices that can help minimize the number of emails that land in the spam folder, including:
- Find the right balance. Sending emails too frequently, especially if they are not of value to the recipient, is not only frustrating for your contacts but will also lead to an increased number of spam reports. This directly and negatively impacts your domain reputation and therefore your future deliverability. On the other hand, many ISPs will filter your emails as spam if you email your contacts too infrequently.
- Avoid using common spam triggers in the subject line. This includes special characters, certain punctuation like exclamation points (!), dollar signs ($) or percent symbols (%) and words and phrases that have been strongly associated with spam and malicious emails – the list is ever-increasing, so make it a habit to regularly look up spam triggers.
- Don’t use all caps in the subject line. Aside from being considered bad email etiquette, this tactic is often associated with spam.
The above considerations are by no means comprehensive, and as spam standards change and evolve, so too must your email marketing.