Does your business have a budding email campaign or a newsletter? If so, your brand’s efforts will eventually encounter spam warnings.
All inboxes these days have some form of protection against spam. Marketing emails are highly likely to end up clashing against spam barriers and never reach the intended audience. This article will explain how to prevent your company’s marketing emails from ending up in the junk mail folder.
First of all, it’s important to have a basic understanding of what spam email is. It refers to any email that is unsolicited, misleading, or intrusive in any manner. Spam emails are also sent to a user as a part of a bulk emailing campaign. Users can easily flag an email as spam if they find it irrelevant and unwanted. Your company’s sender address could end up on a spam blacklist if multiple users flag it.
Read below to learn about how to prevent the scenario described above and to actually deliver your promotional emails to the inboxes of potential customers:
Table of Contents
Keep Your Email List Clean
Do you know how many emails in your list actually belong to real people? Your email list could be littered with invalid, blacklisted, or otherwise illegitimate addresses that increase the risk of your campaign getting marked as spam. Therefore, clean up your list and make sure all the addresses in it belong only to subscribers. To do this, use an email verifier available through a reputable vendor.
Know the Spam Laws
Countries do have spam email laws, much like for direct mail. Services you may use to send emails in bulk, such as MailChimp, are legally obliged to enforce these laws. Knowing the spam laws in your state and country will certainly reduce the risk of sending marketing emails that end up in spam folders.
Spam laws usually spell out how an email should look like to be considered legitimate. For example, the CAN-SPAM Act enforced by the Federal Trade Commission includes a list of requirements that bulk emails must adhere to be legitimate. The Act, for example, bans bulk email senders from using misleading information in the subject lines, headers, and other parts of an email that prompt people to click.
An unsubscribe button or a link is mandatory as well. If your company follows these rules, your email campaign should largely be safe from spam flags.
Avoid Linking if Possible
Email clients like Gmail automatically invalidate certain links included in promotional emails to throttle the spread of malware and phishing scams. The promotional links you include in your emails could be perfectly legitimate, but the email client may not recognize it as such. Therefore, avoid linking to a website in the email or newsletter, if possible. If you do add a link, make sure it is secure and links only to a legitimate website. Securing your business domain with an SSL certificate may reduce the risk of emails containing links to it from getting flagged as spam.
Express Permission is a Must
The best way to prevent getting blacklisted for spam is to ensure that the emails only go to inboxes of people who have expressly given your company permission to send promotional emails. This is the main reason why businesses should avoid buying email lists online. Permission is crucial for keeping your company’s name on the legitimate side of sending marketing emails.
A successful email campaign hinges on the fact that the target audience actually sees the emails your brand sends. Eliminate the risk of spam flagging thus by carefully following the above steps.
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