The Fastest Way To Ruin Your Business
Getting sent through the Spam filter is one of the fastest ways to have your emails lose their deliverability. Once this happens and your email reputation gets damaged it is much harder to regain trust. If you are an email marketer this loss of trust is a death sentence to your business.
Email marketing over the years has evolved and so have the algorithms that email providers use to filter incoming messages. Over the next few paragraphs I am going to show you a simple way to ensure your emails by pass the spam filter and get to your prospects inbox.
How Does A Spam Filter Work?
This question is actually a much bigger question than what I can cover here. However I will give you the broad strokes so that you can be conscious of it when you are preparing your email marketing campaigns.
A spam filter is just that. It’s a filter that uses an inference engine and pre reads your emails prior to acceptance into the inbox. Think of it as the door man at a club. If you are NOT on the list, you are NOT getting in. So how does it do this? What is the spam filter looking for?
Over the years many spam marketers have followed a strategy that used to work, and use a lot of the same words. The spam filter addresses those words in the email and if there are too many of them it rates the email as spam. In my Global NPN back office the email autoresponder checks your emails for you so you can minimize spam type words.
Once the spam filter has decided your email is spam, many of your emails that follow, regardless of quality will be rated as spam. Most people don’t check their spam email very often, they usually just delete it. In fact in my article “Powerful Subject Lines That Compel Your Reader To Open” It talks about the fact that 69% of email recipients will regard an email as spam based on the subject line alone!
So what is an email marketer to do? Well finding a way past the email spam filter may seem like trying to break into the CIA main office building. Since you are not Ethan Hunt, follow these next tips to ethically beat email spam filters.
Five Steps To Avoiding The Spam Filter
1) Build Your List Right
It may seem obvious, but it is important to talk about this one! So many marketers scour the internet looking for email lists to buy. They hear the phrase the money is in the list, and think if they have ten thousand emails they will make money. What actually happens when you buy an email list, is most of the emails are junk.
With junk emails, comes low open rates. Low open rates hurt the deliverability of your emails. Which makes even the emails that make it as far as the spam filter become spam. So you go from ten thousand “people” on a list, to a broke, banned email marketer.
Build your email list the right way. Find a system that helps you build high converting landing pages. Segment your lists so that you send emails that are relevant to each list based on your squeeze page. This way you have permission to email your prospects.
Make sure on your thank you page that you remind people to check their spam filter. Be sure to ask them to add you as a contact. These two simple steps can prevent most of your email problems.
2) Keep Spam Language Out Of Your Subject Line
Remember what I said at the beginning. The spam filter keeps an eye out for those spam type words. If you make the subject line too flashy or too spammy, your email is gone before it ever gets noticed.
The subject line is the absolute first impression a prospects email program meets. Make sure it makes a good first impression. First impress the door man, and then you entice your reader. Once an email is in the inbox, half your work is done.
3) Don’t Spam The Spam Filter
If you are one of those marketers that sends multiple emails a day. Stop it. That is all. Unless you have built that rapport or warned your list that you will email them frequently the spam filter will look at how often you are emailing. If it is too much one of two things will happen. One you will go straight to the spam folder. Or number two, and I would argue this is worse, your email will bounce.
Have you ever heard of a bounced check? This is the same. It states your email isn’t worth the cyber space it’s printed on and it’s out of here. It won’t even take the time to trash it itself. The bounce is detrimental to future deliverability.
4) Purge Your List
Got a huge list, but it seems like not very many people are active on it? That is ok. Make sure you are always building your list. That way you can purge your list from time to time. In my Global NPN email autoresponder I segment the people who never open an email into a list of non openers.
Once a lead hits about 90 days in that list, I delete them. I don’t want people on my list that don’t want to hear from me. This keeps my open rates higher and ensures deliverability of my emails. Be kind to your subscribers, if they don’t want to hear from you, don’t force them too. If they get annoyed they will delete your emails and report them as spam.
5) The Five Laws Of Spam
These five laws are mandatory! Follow these to the letter. These laws are written in antispam legislation. They are straightforward and do not need a lot of extra discussion. Make sure at the very least you practice these five laws and it will go a long way to getting your emails and valuable information to your readers.
- Make sure to include your identity
- Don’t imply something you don’t mean
- Always include an easily identifiable unsubscribe link
- Include your physical address
- Do NOT send to people who have not subscribed
The Spam Filter Is Our Ally
Even with the work it takes to get past it, the spam filter is our ally. How is that you ask? Because once you are through the filter, it shows that your email has some value. As it gets rid of all the emails that are spam, it increases the chances your prospect will open it.
Once an email is opened it increases the chances of it being read. An open and read email has a much higher chance of a sale than one sitting in spam. Take these five tips to the bank, alter your email marketing to follow them, and watch your opens, click throughs and sales start to skyrocket!
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