Keep Your Email Marketing Messages Out of Spam: Tips for Increasing Deliverability

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One of the most important elements of an email marketing campaign is ensuring that your email message makes it to the inbox. Many marketers don’t realize that they are not taking the correct steps to avoid the spam folder. Here are some tips that every business needs to know to help ensure emails make it to the inbox.

Increase Open Rates
High open rates can help you avoid the spam box by showing ESPs that your subscribers want to receive and open your email messages. Focus on testing and optimizing different subject lines and avoid using spammy phrases like free and sale as these can trigger spam filters. Also, be selective about only sending emails to your most engaged audience. This will give you a better chance of increasing your email open rates.

Focus on Relevant Content
Make sure email content is personalized and relevant to the recipient. Email engagement is one of the defining factors of becoming a quality email sender and improving your domain’s reputation. If the target audience opens, clicks on and engages with the email content, this tells the ESPs that the email message is welcomed and warms up your domain. Low engagement scores tell the ESPs that the audience is not interested and therefore your email has a greater chance of going to the spam box.

Clean Up Contact Lists & Segment Audiences
You should clean up your contact lists on a regular basis and suppress any subscribers who no longer engage with your emails. Segmenting contacts into smaller, focused lists can also be beneficial because you can send personalized messages to segmented audiences who are more likely to engage. Maintaining a healthy list is important to the ESPs and you should also keep an eye on your unsubscribe rate. Low unsubscribe rates show the ESPs that your audience wants to keep receiving your messages.

Set Up Your DNS Records
All domains that send marketing emails should have proper DNS records set-up so the ESPs can authenticate them. The most important authentication methods for B2B marketing are DMARC (domain message authentication, reporting & conformance), SPF (sender policy framework), and DKIM (domain keys identified mail). Setting these records up correctly can help boost deliverability rates. In addition, warming up your domain by gradually increasing the number of emails you send out will help build up your reputation with ESPs.