Email marketing is vital to keep your brand at the forefront of people’s minds and bringing customers back to your website. Due to the number of variables that may affect your email marketing, it can become quite a complex issue.
Take a look at each of these potential problems in more depth and see how you can recover from them if you make an error in your own email marketing campaign.
Email marketing is extremely effective when done correctly, follow this guide to ensure you execute it correctly!
Getting Your Emails Flagged as Spam
Analyze your email metrics and check the performance of the content of your emails. There needs to be some measures taken to ensure that you do not get grouped together with spam emails!
Keep your content relevant - producing content that doesn’t interest your readers and material that they didn’t subscribe for, will make your emails perform poorly, often causing them to be ignored or equally worse - marked as spam by your subscribers.
Advise your readers what kind of content you will be sending them – this prepares them for what will be coming their way and can increase engagement in the future. Their expectation level is set to receive your content.
Send a regular survey to your subscribers to see what type of content they would actually like to receive in future emails. Following these steps keeps your customers on board and keeps engagement levels high.
Typos and Spelling Errors
An occasional spelling mistake or typing error, although careless and sometimes frustrating, can be ignored by turning a blind eye. As long as it’s not a potential major mistake that is going to cause offense, it’s often best to just accept it, learn from it, and move on with renewed carefulness.
If you were to have consistent spelling errors or grammatical mistakes, this will make your organization seem like you don’t care and that you lack attention to detail, neither of which are going to help your brand’s image or company success.
Alternatively, if a misspelling changes the meaning of your email copy to something entirely different, or renders a link broken. For example, a misspelled Twitter handle or Instagram profile in an anchor text. You’ll need to correct this as soon as possible to minimize any adverse effects on your campaign or any potential damage to your company image – be careful!
Improving Deliverability
Your hard work will go to waste if you craft a compelling email with an interesting subject line if all your emails get sent straight to the recipients spam box. Passing the spam filter has always been one of the major email marketing challenges for marketers. There are also deliverability issues arising out of a full inbox or non-existent email address.
Luckily, there is a solution for non-existent email addresses – and that is simply to check them. But how do you do that? You can check and validate email addresses by using an email validation service.
This is an easy and convenient way to check if email addresses are real and active.
When your deliverability rate is exceptionally low, you may get blocked by internet service providers. Low deliverability is also a sign of the wasted time, money and effort and a loss of your productivity.
You can avoid getting filtered into the spam box by avoiding spam type words in your subject lines. The variety of words that can set of spam filters varies by the type of industry the email refers to. Some common examples include: buy, cash, earn $, save $, sale, subscribe, make $, click, free, trial, cost, cheap, prize, and unlimited. Avoid these as much as is humanly possible to lower your risk of being caught by the spam net.
Not Knowing or Ignoring Your Sender Reputation
If you’re not aware of what your sender reputation is you should get to know it as its extremely important, there’s a high chance it’s affecting you more than you know. The name is self-explanatory, your sender reputation represents your authenticity and credibility as an email sender. It’s a score that Internet Service Providers (ISP) give in order to regulate email quality and see if what you’re sending is genuine or spam worthy!
Your reputation is determined by multiple factors, including:
- Email Bounce Rates
When an email that you send bounces, it could be due to a temporary problem like a full inbox (soft bounce), or a more permanent issue like a closed email account (hard bounce).
The best way to prevent this from happening is to monitor and review your email lists regularly and renew your addresses to keep an active and efficient list. Those who have not been actively opening your emails are addresses to be monitored and then action can be taken to make your subscriber list a top performer! Doing this will ensure that your email list consists of more active subscribers, whilst reducing bounce rates. - Daily Email Volume
Spam senders typically send out to large lists at once, as they want to have maximum reach. Reputation may be negatively affected if you’re also sending multiple, irrelevant emails to massive groups of people. This is especially true when sending first emails. If ISPs feel that large amounts of mail are coming from a new IP address, they will start to investigate further – with a subsequent effect on your reputation.
To mitigate this, you can follow a staged release schedule to gradually introduce your IP address.
Unsubscribe Rates
If your subscribers are unsubscribing by the bucket load, that’s another warning sign. Assuming that your email content is good quality, you want to ensure that those who subscribe to you are genuinely interested in receiving your information. A double opt-in feature requires the subscriber to check their emails and click a link to approve the subscription. This acts as reassurance for yourself, knowing that you have people on board and for the customer, as it ensures they get the specific information they desire.