Email Marketers use a lot of time drafting touching email copy, designing beautifully branded email templates, and crafting concise and enticing email subject lines that get open and click-through rates skyrocketing.
Although before hitting send, have you analyzed whether your subscribers will even get the chance to read your email?
Email deliverability is the pace at which your email message actually delivered to recipient inboxes. An email deliverability rate can be weaker when an email bounces or gets automatically drained into a spam folder.
No matter how genuine an email marketer you are, there are lots of things you may not even know that can stop your email from ever reaching someone’s inbox. With further stringent laws and increasingly advanced spam filters, it’s to your benefit to know everything that can harm your email’s deliverability.
If running clear of legal trouble isn’t enough to persuade you, pressing more ROI out of your email marketing efforts absolutely should. Take a look at the things you should never do in your email marketing if you want your messages to be successfully delivered and the things you can proactively do to improve your rate of email deliverability.
The first step in increasing email deliverability will be to perform a test to see if you are facing any problems.
15 Ways to Avoid Sending Spam Email & Increase Your Email Deliverability
1. Don’t buy or rent email lists.
Yes, you can rightfully rent and purchase lists of people who have agreed to email communications, but it’s never a noble idea. Not only is it a dirty email marketing tactic that goes against the Terms of Service for your email service provider, but these people don’t know you and, likely, they won’t even want your emails. In other words, there’s a solid chance they’ll mark you as spam. Also, let’s be honest, high-quality email addresses are never for sale.
2. Don’t scrape sites for email addresses.
Searching websites for email addresses may seem like a quick way to build a contact list, but it’s damaging for your company not to mention banned in many countries, including the United States, thanks to the CAN-SPAM Act.
3. Don’t email people who have bounced frequently.
Hard bounces are the outcome of an invalid, closed, or non-existent email address, and those emails will never be delivered. Bounce rates are one of the key parts internet service providers (ISPs) use to define an email sender’s reputation, so having various hard bounces can make them stop allowing your emails in people’s inboxes.
4. Don’t use all caps anyplace in your email or its subject line.
Don’t shout at people. It’s not correct. Using all caps in your subject line might get the receivers’ attention, but apparently not in a good way. Using all caps can really rub people in a bad way. It’s irritating and can seem spammy.
In addition to this, according to a study by the Radicati Group, more than 80% of respondents prefer an all-lowercase subject line to one in all caps.
Rather than using disruptive tactics like all caps to get people’s attention, try personalizing your emails, building relevancy, and using engaging and pleasant language.
5. Don’t use exclamation points!!!
Using this thing can make your subject line and/or email look unprofessional and spammy. Exclamation points, especially a whole bunch of them in a row. And when 70% of email recipients report email as spam based completely on the subject line, you’ll need to stay aside from triggers like this as much as you can.
Also, when you ask punctuation to do a word’s job, it can really weaken your message.
6. Don’t apply video, Flash, or JavaScript within your email.
By default, many email clients don’t enable the ability to view rich media like Flash or video embeds. Alternatively, employ an image of your video player (with a play button) that links to the rich media on a web page.
Similarly for JavaScript and different dynamic scripts, even if a spam filter lets your email through, most email clients won’t support these scripts to function, so avoid using them altogether.
7. Don’t embed forms in your emails.
Forms aren’t recommended in email across popular email clients due to security risks. Rather, place a call-to-action button or a link to a landing page with a form in the body of your email.
8. Don’t add attachments to your emails.
If you want to send your receivers something like a PDF or a Word document, don’t attach the file to the email, or else, your email could get blocked by spam filters. Alternatively, upload the attachment to your site and link it to the file location in your email using an effective call-to-action button. This decreases the risk of being blocked by spam filters and reduces the load time of your email.
9. Don’t use spam trigger words.
One of the simplest ways to avoid spam filters is by thoroughly picking the words you use in your email’s subject line. A useful rule of thumb is this: If it seems like something a used car salesperson would say, it’s apparently a spam trigger word. Think “clear,” “guarantee,” no commitment,” and so on.
Rather than using these trigger words, be productive, interesting, and informative without giving too much away.
10. Don’t practice a red font when drafting your emails.
People don’t admire it when marketers employ unusual fonts, font sizes, and font colors in emails. In that very study by the Radicati Group, out of the top 10 objectionable email trends, four revolve around fonts. Over 60% of respondents acknowledged it unacceptable for email marketers to use complex font sizes, irregular fonts, and various font colors. Nearly 75% of respondents prefer fonts to be one size.
11. Don’t forget to use spell-check.
According to that Radicati Group study, 85% of all respondents find spelling and grammatical errors the common & unacceptable email offenses. But spelling mistakes aren’t just inadequate, they’re a spam trigger, too.
12. Don’t jam-pack your email copy with keywords.
Keyword-stuffing your emails means pushing as many keywords into your emails as you can. There’s a reason Google gives a lower rank to web pages that are filled with keywords — and that’s because it’s bad for user experience. No one wants to read content that’s made for a robot.
To make it more reasonable people will open your emails and not mark them as spam, compose your emails for humans, not robots. Copywriting that makes somebody want to take action is both simple and compelling. To make your writing sound more personable and relatable, use easygoing language, common expressions, and even special stories.
13. Don’t use an awful number of images, or huge images.
Utilizing one large image as your complete email, or too many images in general leads to ending up in receivers’ spam folders.
You’ll also need to make your image file sizes as small as possible without losing their visual integrity to limit long email load times.
Not to mention, Microsoft Outlook doesn’t understand background images, so you may want to dodge those and use a background color alternately.
14. Keep your email lists scrubbed and clean.
Even if your list is solely built on valid opt-ins, you are at risk of being marked a “spammer” if you don’t practice proper email hygiene. Why? Because internet service providers (ISPs) base complaint rates on active subscribers, not total subscribers.
Moreover, expired email addresses can turn into SPAM traps, indicating that even if you legitimately acquired emails, the discarded addresses that haven’t engaged in years may have morphed into spam traps. Hitting even just one spam trap can create deliverability problems.
Expired email addresses can also turn into anonymous users (bounces). If you hit unknown accounts at a rate higher than 5%, then ISPs are going to see you as someone who has really poor email hygiene. The result? They’ll make it more difficult for your emails to reach people’s inboxes, and your overall sender reputation will drop, driving even more trouble reaching people’s inboxes.
By managing your email lists current and clean, you’ll reduce the likelihood that people will flag your emails as spam. You can distinguish inactive subscribers and expired email addresses with metrics such as opens, clicks, or site activity. You can use Clearalist Email List Cleaning Tool to reduce hard bounces
15. Check your sender’s reputation.
The biggest cause of why your emails are not delivered is a poor sender score. ISPs automatically refuse any emails that fall below a certain score.
Sender Score is provided by Return Path. Sender Score allows a number to every outgoing mail server. The score is determined by using common email metrics such as unsubscribes and spam reports.
