How to stop email newsletters going into Junk and Spam

If you are like me then over the last couple of years you will have started to receive more and more email newsletters from various businesses, some of which your acquainted with and others where you have no idea how they came by your email address. Many of these end up in your junk or spam folder.

On the flip side, if you are a business owner, then you may have started to send email newsletters to existing contacts and prospects and wondered why your open rates, if you are looking at that particular metric, are so low.

In this article you will see a few easy steps you can take to increase the number of emails that actually hit the inbox.

Verify your email sending domain

Many of the mail sending services such as Hubspot, Mailchimp, MailerLite etc. make it relatively easy to get your email sending domain verified. If you don’t get the domain verified then your emails get sent with a FROM address with an appendage from the email service which sent it highlighting it as a marketing mailshot and when the vast majority of email clients see this, it’ll go straight into a spam folder. All of the popular services have a knowledge base with help on how to do this. We’ve listed three here:

Mailchimp – https://mailchimp.com/help/verify-a-domain/

Hubspot – https://knowledge.hubspot.com/email/verify-the-email-address-used-to-send-marketing-emails

MailerLite – https://help.mailerlite.com/article/show/29280-how-to-verify-and-authenticate-your-domain

Ask your receipients to white list your email address

Ask your recipients to add your FROM address to their ‘safe senders’ list of ‘contacts’ list. The major email clients work hard to ensure that emails don’t go to spam if the email addresses are already in your contacts. To make this easier include instructions on how to do this. Don’t assume that all of your readers have the technical know how to be able to do this without help.

Do not use spammy subject lines

The spam filters wil llook for subject lines which indicate it might be a spam email such as ‘Limited Time Offer’ or @Bonus Offer’ or ‘Need more Cash’ . You get the idea. Personalise the sugbject line if you can with their first name and make the subject line engaging. Keep away from too many exclamation marks, mentioning money or promising discounts.

Have a clear Sender Address

This is the address which appears in the FROm field of the email. You still see lots coming through with a random mixture of letters and numbers. As mentioned earlier get your email sending domain verified and use an actual person’s name or at the very least your company name in the senders email address.

Make it easy for people to opt-out.

The GDPR rules make it a requirement to give people the option to opt out. Whilst this might sound counter-intuitive, ensuring its relatively easy for recipients to do, shows recipients you have confidence in your content and builds trust.

Clean Your Database

Take a look at your database of contacts and take the time to purge those which have hard bounced or for which you’ve received an auto-reply telling you the person is no longer working there. Also take a look at those who have never ever interacted with your emails in any way and ask yourself if you want those on your database at all.

So there you have it. A few ideas on how to get more of your emails actually into the inboxes of those people you want to read them. If you have any other ideas and tips then please add them in the comments below.