Many of our customers call and send support tickets how to keep their email campaigns from going to the junk or spam folder. This month, I thought I would touch on the subject and tell you some tips and tricks to keep your campaigns in the inbox.
These days, your subject line and content of your email is what determines where your email ends up. If you have too many negative items in your subject line and/or content, your email can end up in the dreaded junk folder. Below are some common mistakes that you should avoid to get the best results possible in your emails marketing efforts.
Punctuation - Avoid using anything but numbers and letters in your subject line. In your content, avoid excessive punctuation, such as multiple exclamation points after a sentence, as well as multiple dollar signs or percent signs.
All Caps - You should never capitalize a whole work in your subject line or content. It is acceptable, however to capitalize the first letter of each word.
Spam Key Trigger Words and Phrases - This can get tricky as it is a moving target. As a general rule, avoid words and phrases that are overused in marketing. Words like sale, free, money, opportunity, etc. Also avoid words and phrases that are overly reported in the news media. To give you an idea, the word stimulus wasn't an issue for email marketing until you couldn't watch TV without hearing the word "stimulus package" on every channel.
Testing - You should always send yourself a test email prior to sending a live campaign. The best test is to use Outlook with the spam setting set to low. Using free online email services is the worst place to test. For example, we are white listed with Yahoo.com. This means that the email will always go to the inbox regardless of the subject line and content of your email. Therefore, if you send a test email to Yahoo.com, it is not a true representation of what will happen in the real world.
For a more in-depth look at how the spam folder works, please check out our YouTube channel below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tu9qY3JB5v0