One of the most low-cost approaches in reaching out to customers and generating sales is through email marketing campaigns.
This method can return $42 for every $1 invested on it, which means that it’s 40 times more efficient than Facebook or Twitter at attracting new clients.
To make the most of this number, you first need to make sure that your emails are actually opened and read by your subscribers.
If your open rates are low, it’s possible that your subscribers don’t even see your emails since they’re going straight to spam folders.
If you want to maximize your email marketing, keep reading! In this, we’ll share 10 of the best practices to avoid spam complaints and make sure your emails get into the inbox.
What Are Spam Complaints?
Spam complaints are reports submitted by email recipients about emails that they do not want to receive.
Even genuine senders receive spam complaints, so it’s crucial to understand how they function and how to prevent them.
If a high volume of your emails land in the spam or junk folders, ISPs may restrict your future emails, preventing even those who want to hear from you from doing so.
The complaint rate was previously overlooked, but a new study demonstrates that high spam complaint rate account for 20% of deliverability issues.
Tips to Avoid Spam Complaints
The following are the best techniques to keep your emails from being flagged as spam:
1. Don’t Buy Lists!
Email content is critical for sending crucial information to customers, providing delivery notifications or security alerts, and so on.
However, it won’t benefit your subscribers if the emails never reach their inboxes or are sent to an unresponsive audience.
You’ll want to build an email list of people who wish to receive your emails so that you can guarantee engagement and avoid spam complaints. As such, avoid purchasing email lists from a third party.
It’s ideal to build your mailing list organically in the long run. It’s not the simplest or quickest approach to expand your mailing list or audience, but it’s the most effective.
Keep in mind that when you purchase a mailing list, you aren’t acquiring it exclusively. Several different businesses have likely bought the exact list.
Because of this, email subscribers who unexpectedly get a flood of emails from various vendors are more inclined to unsubscribe and flag the emails as spam.
Numerous spam complaints will result in an increase in feedback loop reports and complaints, giving ISPs reason to be suspicious of future emails from you.
2. Always Ask For Permission
One guaranteed method to get your email address flagged — and as a result, have every succeeding email campaign routed to spam — is not using a permission based suscription and begin emailing individuals who haven’t given you their consent to receive your campaigns.
Implementing a permission based suscription will enhance the integrity of your email list and ensure that everyone receiving your emails are genuinely interested in it.
A double opt-in is a technique of acquiring a user’s consent to send them marketing emails when they register for an email subscription and then validating that agreement by providing a follow-up containing a link to open and affirm the subscription.
Here are some guidelines of when or when not to send emails:
When To Send Emails
Sending emails to users who have signed up for your mailing list on your website is acceptable If a person has opened an account or purchased something from your ecommerce website, you should get their consent to send them emails.
A lot of emails are marked as spam or sent to the spam or junk folders because they’re being sent to people that are not interested in that content. So it’s very important to make sure you are sending campaigns to potential customers. It’s fine to send emails to those who have signed up for your emails at your exhibition booth.
By doing this you protect yourself from getting spam complaints and also do a favor to your clients so they don’t receive unwanted emails.
When Not To Send Emails
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- The email list was purchased or rented from a reputable supplier.
- Attendees’ email addresses came from exhibits or conferences. Regardless of what the sponsors claim, this isn’t a valid mailing list.
- You possess a list of group members and Facebook followers that you believe will suffice. This is also not a legitimate email list. It can only be used if you have consent for sending them emails.
3. Give the Option to Unsubscribe and Make It Visible!
Making it simple for receivers to unsubscribe improves customer relations, reduces spam complaints, and ensures that you’re only sending emails to individuals who want them. As such, it’s essential to place an unsubscribe link in all your emails.
To avoid annoying your customers, make sure that your unsubscribe link is visible and functional. Send a confirmation message if they opt to unsubscribe, taking advantage of the opportunity to learn why they are doing so. This will offer you helpful information that you can use to improve your email campaigns.
An unsubscribe has no bearing on your reputation as a sender, while spam complaints do. As a result, it’s better if a disgruntled customer clicks the unsubscribe link before things become too contentious.
If you don’t give the option to unsubscribe there will be a lot of people receiving unwanted emails that eventually will be marked as spam.
4. Make Your Emails Trustworthy
If you want your emails to be read, you need to make sure they appear trustworthy. Emails should be sent from a domain-linked email address.
Ensure that the sender’s name is set to your corporate name unless you know the recipient personally or are confident that they are aware of your workplace.
Make a special effort to keep everything in line with your brand image. Your customers most likely already know what kind of content, graphics, and design components to anticipate from you, so don’t go too far and run the risk of losing their trust.
5. Clean Your Lists
It’s preferable to have a shorter, more active email list than an extensive, uninterested list. To have the most active list possible, keep track of all users’ email engagement.
While it may seem counterintuitive, deleting individuals from your email list to improve deliverability is frequently a wise decision.
It’s crucial to regularly remove inactive or invalid email addresses, as a considerable volume of inactive subscribers can significantly influence deliverability by offsetting your engagement rates.
Mailbox providers view low engagement levels as a clear sign of a lower-quality sender. Consider implementing a reconfirmation campaign or deleting or hiding inactive subscribers after a particular time frame.
Your list’s quality is far more significant and beneficial to your company than its size. Go ahead and tidy up your mailing list and witness your sender reputation and engagement skyrocket!
6. Verify the Emails From Your Lists
Spam placement rates can be high if your mailing list contains invalid email addresses.
If you ignore repeated delivery problems and keep sending emails to invalid recipients, your sending IP address is more likely to be blocked by mailbox providers.
You can use email validators to keep your mailing list clean. You can verify your list via these services to ensure that the email addresses belong to real people.
Email validator reports often include the following deliverability statuses:
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- Deliverable: This indicates that the email addresses of the receivers are valid.
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- Invalid: These email addresses are nonexistent.
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- Accept all: It is impossible to verify these email addresses thoroughly. Some domains always respond with a valid status when using these email addresses. These domains usually strive to safeguard their actual users by notifying the sender mail server that they will receive a message for a specific email address but then deleting it or transmitting a bounce response instead.
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- Disposable: Users create these email addresses for them to be eligible in signing up for promotions. The best course of action is to remove these email addresses since they lower your open rates and hurt your sender’s reputation.
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- Unknown: This status indicates that the recipient’s mail server is unresponsive. If the target mail server is slow or unavailable, this could be a temporary status.
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- Spam traps: Mailbox providers, filtering services, and anti-spam companies produce these addresses, which are then disseminated around the internet and processed. They’re utilized to track down spammers and senders who purchased their email lists or gathered addresses through unlawful means. When spam traps emerge on your list, your email will be routed to the spam folder by mailbox providers.
7. Be Considerate With the Amount of Emails You Send
The importance of email frequency is undervalued when it comes to campaign success, yet it should be.
Sending too many emails to your subscribers will drive some of them to unsubscribe or flag you as spam.
The same may be said for delivering too few emails, causing your subscribers to lose track of who you are. When they receive another email from you, they may not recognize you and tag you as spam.
According to a poll conducted by TechnologyAdvice, over half of email subscribers (45.8%) will mark emails as spam if they receive too many.
Another study by DMA Insight found that B2C brands are more willing to receive emails frequently (weekly or biweekly on average), but most B2B organizations receive fewer emails (with the majority preferring 1-3 times every month.).
8. Mind the Content of Your Email
Mailbox providers use automated filtering technologies to combat spam. You’ll want to double check if the content of your email can be interpreted as spam by these technologies.
Some of them scrutinize every detail of your email to assess if it should be designated as spam or forwarded to a recipient’s inbox.
The subject line, HTML code, header, footer, text-to-image ratio, URLs, attachments, spam terms, and other aspects are all checked.
For effectively passing a spam filter, below is a list of things you should avoid:
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- No shortened URLs or link redirections: Spammers frequently use these strategies to mask actual links, so mailbox providers keep an eye out for them.
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- Avoid complex scripts: These include JavaScript, VBScript, ActiveX, Frames, Java applets, Iframes, and Frames supplied from external CSS, Meta Refresh websites.
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- Spam terms in the subject line or body of your email: There are a plethora of spam trigger phrases online, the most common of which are sale, price, blockchain, free, and so on.
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- Caps lock should not be used excessively: For spam filters, utilizing all caps in the subject line is a no-no. To put emphasis on your subject line, experiment with alternative copywriting techniques, psychological tricks, or emojis.
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- Exclamation points should be used sparingly: Exclamation points do not just indicate enthusiasm; instead, they serve as a warning to spam filters. These subject lines are similar to spam emails that are used to mislead receivers.
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- Don’t forget to double-check your HTML: Broken HTML might cause a message to be rendered incorrectly, resulting in spam complaints.
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- Don’t utilize too many images: Maintaining a text-to-image ratio of 80/20 in email content is a popular rule of thumb. Of course, senders with a strong reputation and a large number of engaged subscribers may afford to utilize more images. An email with only images, on the other hand, is never tolerated by spam filters.
9. Send Valuable and Relevant Content
A dedication to delivering relevant, interesting information to your subscribers is at the heart of any effective email campaign. This entails being deliberate in your sending habits and refraining from emailing just to email.
Sending emails without thought can hurt your engagement, which is the last thing you want. If your emails do not appeal to your recipients, you risk being ignored—or worse, being forwarded to spam.
You may naturally establish a process favorable for increasing your sales by providing relevant information that people want to receive. You can accomplish this by providing content that people want to find and read. Those who are enthusiastic about your content will form a bond with you, and when it comes time to purchase, you will be at the topmost priority. Always offer helpful information. Don’t be overly promotional or overbearing.
Finally, try segmenting your mailing list so that you send personalized material to each of your subscribers. Keep an eye on your engagement numbers and experiment with various content types.
It can take a lot of trial and error to figure out what kind of email content best suits your business, so don’t be afraid to attempt new things and different forms of copy as you grow to understand your recipients.
10. Run Spam Tests
Spam tests are internet programs that let you evaluate your emails to see if they’re likely to be designated as spam. Even though ISPs have the last say in how messages are screened, spam checkers can provide a sense of security to senders as they plan new campaigns.
Your email could be failing spam testing for a variety of reasons. It could be your IP address, the email’s content, or the domain you’re sending it from.
In some circumstances, too many subscribers may have flagged your emails as spam and made spam complaints, causing spam filters to kick in. As such, you should segment your email lists and offer content tailored to those groups whenever possible.
Monitor Your Email Campaigns to Avoid Spam Complaints
Since every audience is diverse and prefers distinct types of content, email marketing presents a unique problem. The more you know about your target market and their email inclinations, the better.
The techniques listed above might assist you in avoiding spam complaints, help you in meeting your market where they are, and provide you with a starting point. It’s up to you to decide what happens next.
The greater your email engagement, the better your chances of avoiding spam complaints and filters and landing in the inbox.