As an email marketer, it’s important to make sure consumers you send emails to are actually getting them. Blacklists, spam filters and all sorts of other automated technologies can keep email out of the inbox. Don’t panic though, there are steps you can take to ensure emails are delivered, based on our own experience delivering more than 100 million emails in a year.
1). Monitor the returned email server codes from your bounced emails. The three digit error codes that begin with 4 or 5 are sometimes cryptic but will help you understand if any of your emails were flagged as spam. Most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have an online form to help you fix the problem and there’s often a URL included in the email server codes. Monitoring these codes is very important in the coming holiday season when ISPs will be more likely to flag legitimate marketing email as spam. Generally bounce codes that begin with 4 are soft bounces and those that begin with a 5 are hard bounces, however, we see legitimate marketing emails sometimes flagged with misleading codes because they are suspected spam.
2). Ask your subscribers add your address to their contact list. This is an easy way to ensure your email makes it to your subscribers. To accomplish this, you can simply add a phrase in your newsletter asking them to add you.
3). Be consistent with your email campaigns. Be consistent with frequency of emails sent, for email content, with subject lines, and other things. Your customers will recognize your email and will be less prone to flag it as spam.
4). Optimize your email design. Try to be consistent with your email templates by keeping recurring elements in the same spots. Being consistent will make it easier for your audience to find what they are most interested in as well as build brand awareness. It is okay to update your design every once in a while, but try to keep the same feel so customers don’t get too big of a surprise.
5). Avoid attachments and large images. Bulk email cannot include attachments and an attempt to do that will raise a red flag with ISPs. Also, avoid emails that are too large and try to keep an email under 40K to 60K at the most (send a test to yourself and see how large it is in Outlook, or whatever your email reader is). Sometimes an email can be incorrectly flagged as spam just because of the size.
6). Watch your ratio of text to images. Keep your ratio as close to 50% text, 50% image as you can. When an email gets sent that is mostly image, it can easily be flagged as spam by ISPs. Plus, if your customers have images turned off due to security settings they won’t see your message.
Check back in tomorrow for a look at how the automotive industry has been performing over the past two months.
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