Whether you send out monthly newsletters, upcoming deals or your latest work, you want your emails to reach as many people as possible without them being automatically filtered into their junk folder.

If your emails are ending up in that spam folder we’ve taken a look at three ways to increase the chances of them arriving safely into your customer’s or client’s inbox.

Do you have consent?

Avoid buying a contact list or sending emails to people who have not given their consent, if you do this the likelihood is your email will be marked as spam. The best open rates for email campaigns are from recipients that already know you, and the quality products or services you’re able to provide. Remember that a big part of email marketing is about building a relationship with these people. Send to those who know you, and avoid unsolicited cold emails; a quality email list will see your unsubscribes lower, along with the number of times you’re marked as spam.

Get your content right

Anyone who’s read about online marketing knows that content is king, and the humble email is no different! There are a few basics o steer clear of when it comes to content in email marketing; here are just three of the most common we often see:

Using special characters instead of letters.

Don’t be tempted to litter your email with exclamation points or other symbols in order to hammer home the point! For example, the MiHi logo is M!Hi, but we use replace the exclamation mark with an ‘i’ for this reason! If we see upper case lettering or a flurry of punctuation we won’t like it any more than your email filter! SALE NOW ON!!!

Bad websites.

If you’re linking to a variety of sites within your content then ensure they’re all of good quality. Just like Google, your email will detect any links that are of risk. It’s also good housekeeping to run a malware check on your own website to ensure it’s in good health and free from attack.

If you’re tempted to use URL shorteners such as ow.ly or bit.ly then don’t; they’re not great for your email’s performance so give your email client the real URL to increase your deliverability chances.

Images and no text.

A picture paints a thousand words, and who doesn’t like a great looking email? But ensure you have a balance of text and imagery. Those email campaigns that have only images will not only hit the spam filter but also provide you with performance issues (remember that email clients such as Microsoft Outlook disable images as default. Your recipients will be seeing a blank page until they’ve enabled your images, and we don’t want that!).

Make sure it’s relevant and people can unsubscribe

Getting your content right is the golden rule in avoiding spam filters. Just like you, your recipients want to receive only interesting information in their inbox. Get your content right for your email list; all emails should be relevant to the person receiving them.

We’ve already mentioned that you want to be sending only to people who are aware of you; including your brand name in the subject line, and / or the From field will help them recognise that the email is from you before opening them.

Subject lines also need to relate to the body of the email. If they don’t, the Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) will remove any emails that break the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.

You will also be penalised if people can’t unsubscribe easily via an unsubscribe button and you fail to react to their request within 10 days.

For more information on how we can help your social media presence give us a call on 01566 232323 or email hello@mihidigital.co.uk