Email Marketing Tips: How To Stay Out of the Spam Box

Unlike popular channels like print media or television, email marketing is a very personal and customized form of marketing. While it’s easy to reach people through television or newspapers, with email marketing you can't be sure your messages are even making it to your audience's inbox.

At the end of the day, nothing matters more to an email marketer than deliverability. If your emails suffer from poor deliverability, then regardless of how good your campaigns are, all your efforts are futile. Worldwide statistics indicate that over 80% of all email traffic is spam. No wonder ISPs employ brutal and intelligent algorithms to weed out spam mails.

Think of email in terms of a car. After your email message leaves your company's server, it must "drive" through various checkpoints before it can reach a recipient's email inbox. Now, what if someone told you the model of the car determines whether you can pass through the checkpoints. Enter domain reputation: the easiest, simplest way for ISPs to block your campaigns.

Domain reputation has by far the biggest impact on your deliverability -- it's like your brand name. It doesn’t matter if your email message is engaging and offers wonderful benefits to your audience; if it doesn’t meet ISP expectations, it's going to rot in someone’s spam folder. In fact, it might not even make it to the spam folder.

So how can you improve your email's deliverability?

Watch your reputation: A good domain reputation definitely contributes to deliverability, but so does your IP reputation. If you have bad mailing practices or get a lot of spam complaints, even your email server’s IP address can be used against you. If your IP address gets blacklisted, then your emails are just as likely to land in spam folders. Your server could also be in the IP range of a spammer, which is bad news too.

Get a new domain: If your domain has already taken a bad hit, sometimes it’s better to start fresh. A fresh domain is easy to get and provides a clean slate for you to work with. Once you've gotten a new domain, make sure you're using a clean and updated list of email IDs. If you're using old and stale databases, your fresh domain is susceptible to getting trashed again. When brands suffer from deliverability, they often think switching ESPs can improve deliverability. You actually can’t blame your ESP for deliverability since your entire history of engagement and your database contribute to your deliverability.

Beware of spam traps: ISPs sometimes use old, deactivated accounts to scout for spammers. A campaign going out to an email ID that’s been dead for years gives ISPs the impression the sender is an unsolicited sender. Ensure you routinely clean your database.

Understand the difference between dedicated IPs vs. shared IPs: If you are a high-volume sender, using a dedicated IP works best. However, don’t start sending out bulk volumes right from the get-go. Always have a warm-up plan. Send small volumes, and especially send to your regular openers and active clickers. If ISPs notice your emails are having high engagement, it puts you in a positive light, which means higher deliverability. Once you’ve established a good rapport with your ISPs, higher volumes then can be sent. A dedicated IP gives you greater control over your email’s deliverability.

If you choose to employ a third-party mailing service, there’s a high chance that you'll end up in a shared IP pool. The plus side of shared IPs is your emails have a good chance of making it to your audience's inboxes due to the good practices adopted by your fellow senders. The downside is the absence of control you have over mailing practices that happen across the IP pool, and your good deliverability might get affected if there’s a spammer in the pool. Spoofing attacks are another issue of concern. If someone’s shooting spam using your credentials, down goes your deliverability again.

You'll always be walking a tightrope when you embark on a new email marketing campaign because you'll never know if ISPs have given you a spammer tag. You, therefore, should always stick to good practices like cleaning your lists, diligently analyzing your deliverability and engagement, and avoiding any steps that could hurt your domain reputation.