Have you, as an email marketer spent countless hours meticulously creating a wonderfully branded email template, crafting the most roll of the tongue subject line with the expectation for your click-through and open rates to skyrocket? Well, before you hit send, have you considered whether your recipients will even get the chance to read your email?
Whether you’re a veteran email marketer or new to the game, there are a variety of things you may not even be aware of which can prevent deliverability of your email. You can find more technical information on Email Marketing Deliverability in this blog, but for this blog we will be focusing on those pesky spam filters.
Now you might ask what a spam filter actually is. In simple terms, a spam filter is designed, created and utilised to stop any spam emails from ever reaching an end users inbox. Spam filters base their judgements on certain criteria which use complex algorithms to subject emails through a set of predefined rules which then assign them a score. If the score is below the threshold, the email will be marked as spam and end up in the junk or spam folder.
So let’s talk about what happens, why it happens and how we can avoid spam filters flagging our legitimate emails, stopping them from ending up in the inbox.
A high-quality email will serve to not only increase engagement but really empower and show that your brand is expected to have a clean and professional standard. To achieve this you can do the following:
- Text Formatting: It’s not too complicated, TRY NOT TO YELL AT PEOPLE and let’s not over-exaggerate!!!!!!!!! Keep your text content simple and professional. Goes without saying that you should spell check your content too.
- Going from the subject line to the email itself, keep your font size consistent, avoid font sizes below 9px or larger than 36px and steer clear of excessive punctuation which may earn you additional spam points. Instead why not try personalising your email, including recipient’s names or titles which can attract much more attention than loud formatting.
- Balance: It is important to achieve a balanced amount of content in your email; this means that too many of either images, links or text should be avoided, remember spam filters will scrutinize all the content in your email. If you find yourself sending an email with a majority of either of these then stop and reconsider how you could balance the content, for example for image heavy campaigns consider using alt text to balance image to text ratio. An ideal text to image ratio is believed to be around 60% text and 40% images, while this is not a hard and fast rule, it’s a good idea to keep this in mind when designing your emails.
- The code: Don’t worry it’s not as scary as it sounds. There are a few best practises involved in the coding of your email which should be followed to avoid being blocked unnecessarily by any spam filter. Additional or broken tags, copied or poorly written code can all raise a flag, as can using certain coding languages which are not supported in emails such as JSS and PHP. However thankfully with Campaignmaster’s CMAdvantage email marketing platform, powerful WYSIWYG and Drag and Drop editors you can ensure, clean, best practise code is always used in your email campaigns.
If you have any questions regarding email marketing please get in touch at info@campaignmaster.co.uk and speak with one of our friendly reps.
