How to Keep Your Campaigns Out of the Spam Folder

Let’s talk about how to keep your email campaigns out of the spam folder.

I just had a call with a new client (who just raised a bunch of venture capital) and saw significant revenue growth last year.

While their business is growing at an incredible pace, they have recently seen a sharp decline in the open rates of their manual email campaigns (the rates are hovering around 7-12%).

Which means a lot of the emails are most likely ending up in spam folders (Note: Anything below a 10% open rate is concerning and should be immediately addressed).

On my call with them, I outlined 3 strategies that I want to share with you today that will help keep your emails out of spam, in the inbox, and converting more of your list into buyers.

1. List Segmentation

If you operate anything like a lot of the brands I speak with, you are probably sending emails the WRONG WAY – an email blast to your entire list (or a subset of that list) and then resending the same email to individuals who didn’t open the email.

Here’s the problem …. By sending to everyone on your list, and then to those that didn’t open, you are targeting the LEAST engaged people on your email list. This will result in LOW open rates, and signal to providers like Google that your emails are low quality and should be marked as spam.

Instead, segment your campaigns based on the level of engagement of each person. Send MORE emails to more engaged folks, and LESS to the less engaged.

This will ensure a higher open rate. Higher open rates lead to high click throughs and higher click throughs lead to more purchases.

2. Automated Campaign Flows

Leveraging automated campaigns like welcome sequences, abandoned cart, browse abandonment, and post purchase helps build your sender reputation and keep you out of spam.

Why?

Since these folks have been engaging with your site and previous emails, they are expecting these automated campaigns, which means they are much more likely to open them. Automated flows typically see open rates of 30-40%.

A higher open rate signals to providers (like gmail) that your emails are quality – and should stay out of the spam folder (and in front of your audience).

3. Design templates correctly

When it comes to branding, visual aesthetics can be a key factor. However, by placing more attention on your visual brand (and over designing the email) than the text content of your email,  campaigns can easily be flagged as spam.

Why?

Most brands make the mistake over using as much imagery as possible to build a visual look for
their emails – often times layering text onto photos.

The issue is that all providers see is a massive image hitting the inboxes of a large quantity of individuals – and they flag it as spam.

Help providers easily identify your campaigns as quality content by separating visuals from text.

Even the best branding is rendered ineffective if it never reaches the eyes of your audience.