If you’ve noticed a dip in your open rates, you might be the victim of junk folders. Even though they’re clearly not spam, your emails might still be flagged for a number of reasons, which means they aren’t being opened by your audience. If you want to avoid this from happening, follow these best practices.
Make sure emails are sent from your own domain
While it’s fine to send emails to a friend or colleague from a gmail or outlook email address, when you’re sending to a large email list, it’s not advised. In fact, the sender is one of the most important parts of your email if you want to prevent your emails ending up in the junk folder.
💡 Make sure the newsletters you send are from the domain email which matches your website domain name, so that the algorithm can determine your identity.
Maintain your sender reputation
Sender reputation is like a rating for your business – if you follow the rules, are professional and polite, you’ll get 5 stars. But if you’re rude, your rating will drop. The same can be said of your sender reputation – it’s a score given to your sending domain based on the quality of the emails you send, the frequency and the subscriber engagement.
Your sender reputation can be impacted by email bounce rates, spam complaints, or by spam traps.
Optimise the email copy
Spam filters don’t analyse the context of the copy in an email so they’ll flag anything that’s associated with spam. This means you need to:
- Keep the content short (ideally under 200 words)
- Don’t use too many exclamation points
- Don’t write in all caps
- Make sure that the email is written correctly as incorrect spellings will trigger the spam filter.
There are also certain trigger words you should avoid, such as anything that makes your email sound too pushy, outlandish or desperate.
Keep the image-to-text ratio balanced
Spammers used to get around spam filters by creating image-only emails, and as a result of this, if your email is image-heavy with very little text, you might be penalised. Many email clients don’t actually display images by default unless the recipient sets them to be displayed by default, or adds you to their address book, so keeping the images to a minimum will not only improve the user experience but also prevent your emails ending up in spam.
Use high-quality links
Each domain you link to has its own reputation, and linking to domains with a poor reputation could impact yours. You need to protect your link quality by only linking out to legitimate sites that are trustworthy, and avoiding the use of link shorteners like bit.ly. Make sure that any affiliate links you use are above board too.
Naturally, there are several factors which will influence whether your emails are being seen and opened by your target audience but following these tips will help to reduce the risk of your newsletters winding up in the junk folder.
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