Beat the spam filter and Increase Email Inbox deliverability Rate
Great, you’ve got an awesome HTML email newsletter (coded the right way of course), which you’re itching to send out to your list. One massive obstacle is in your way though, the dreaded spam filter! You could have the most amazing email in the world but if it goes straight into spam, the chances of it being read are a lot less likely.
There are, however, a number of best practices and steps we can take to increase the likelihood of our email ending up in the reader’s inbox and and actually read…
Spam check tools.
The higher your spam score, the more likely your email will end up in the spam box! The aim here is to reduce it as much as you can. If you use an Email Service Provider such as Email Vision or Mail Chimp, they have built in spam score checkers which will give you recommendations. Alternatively a good online spam score checker is http://www.contactology.com/check_mqs.php. Run your email through any of these spam checkers and follow the advice given.
Good text to image ratio
Emails should be designed with a good text-to-image ratio. Image-only emails look nice and can be right on-brand, but will probably go straight into spam. On the other extreme, text only emails work well for email clients in terms of inbox deliverability, but look boring and off-brand. As a best-of-both-worlds compromise, utilise around a 60-40 split in favour of web safe HTML text.
Avoid ‘spam’ words
Certain symbols and words are known to trigger spam filters. Avoid or at least minimise use of
- Excessive exclamation marks!!!!!!
- WRITING IN ALLCAPS
- Words like ‘download now’, ‘FREE’, ‘click here’, ‘buy now’ etc. Especially in the subject line.
- ‘Click here’ links. Anchor text should be indicative of what it links to i.e. rather than ‘click here to unsubscribe’, ‘unsubscribe here’ works better.
Powerful subject lines
Pay particular attention to your subject line. A good one will make the reader click inside to read more, a bad one will send your email straight to the trash! Readers are usually bombarded with emails and will skim through the subject lines, only opening emails that interest them the most. It actually turns into a competition over who can get the most attention! Make sure your subject line is short, sweet and most importantly, attention grabbing enough to make readers want to click inside.
The first line of your email is very important and can provide valuable extra information to your readers. In some email clients such as Gmail, the email description after the subject line comprises the first line of your email. So if your first line is ‘click here to unsubscribe’ or ‘click here for an online version’, as it so often is with newsletters, this will appear as the email description after your title… not great, not very descriptive. However, if your email title is ‘Top Tips to Beat the spam filter’ and your first line is ‘Increase Email Inbox deliverability Rate’, this gives your reader a little more information about what’s inside the email which in some cases can be the deciding factor on whether your email gets read or gets sent straight to the trash.
Well formed HTML
It sounds ironic given that email newsletters are coded in a very backwards kind of way, but make sure your HTML is well formed. It doesn’t need to adhere to W3C standards but some email clients factor in HTML errors, so reduce your HTML errors to reduce the spam score. Things to ensure include: closing all tags, properly nesting tags, adding width and height values to an image without unit of measurement (default is pixels) and replacing symbols with the right escape code.
Escape Codes
Don’t copy and Paste text from a text editor such as Word into your Email Client. Certain symbols might not be recognised by the email client and render as a ‘?’ symbol. Make sure all symbols such as apostrophes, copyright, pound, dollar, quotation marks etc are replaced with their relevant escape codes. e.g. Replace all £ symbols with the escape code £ For a full list of escape codes, see http://www.escapecodes.info
Descriptive image names
Often, if the email client is unsure of the sender, it will block the images by default. We want the reader to at least have an idea of what the email is about, even without images, so we need to adopt a meaningful naming convention for the title, alt text and file name as it is one of these values that replaces the images if they are turned off. If the message and content is meaningful enough, the reader is more likely to read your newsletter.
So make sure descriptive images are given descriptive alt text, names and titles. If the images are turned off, the user will still have an idea what it is. Also ensure non-descriptive images such as spacers or images slices have blank alt text, titles and short names. This minimises the clutter on emails where the images are turned off and titles are displayed.
You wouldn’t need to worry about this though if you was a safe sender, as the images would be displayed by default.
Safe contact list
Have a line in the body that asks your reader to add your email address to their contacts. This will increase the likelihood of future emails reaching the inbox with all images intact. Something like ‘add newsletters@lykc.co.uk to your safe senders list to ensure you always receive our newsletters’ works.
Personalisation and Relevance
An email looks a 100 times more legitimate when the reader sees their own name or username on the email. Most Email Service Providers allow tag templates to be used for names and usernames so make sure you utilise these. ‘Hi LYKC’ is a lot more personal and looks a lot better than simply ‘Hi Reader’.
Following on from readers wanting personalised emails, readers are interested in content that is relevant to them, so generic emails which have nothing to do with the reader are a major put off. Split your email list into targeted segments and send relevant emails to the relevant people. Bombarding your readers with multiple emails full of unrelated content will make them head straight to the unsubscribe link, so make sure you keep it relevant.
Test, Trial and Error
As with most things in life and the same with trying to beat the spam filter, test often. Try different things, drop the things that don’t work and carry on doing the things that do work. With the increasing amount of actual spam out there, we will always face a challenge to reach intended inboxes especially as spam filters are never perfect and liable to change their spam scoring system at any given time. So until the spam system becomes 100% reliable, follow the best practices outlined above to boost your chances of beating the spam filter and actually reaching your readers inbox.
