Have you ever wondered why your emails end up as junk or spam and don’t make it to the person at the end other?
Me too – so I did some investigating and here’s what I found out.
Email messaging is one of the oldest methods of communication … pretty much since the internet began – and it still remains the most official form of communication – even with all that happens on social media!
E-mail communication is the heart and soul of most businesses; it’s the method most people adapt to communicate with clients, partners or vendors.
However, the biggest problem when it comes to email is making sure your carefully crafted and written emails make it to their destination!
So many emails go undelivered due to various reasons, and some do get delivered but they end up in the dreaded “junk” or “spam” folders.
I’ve got a couple of pointers to make sure your emails get to the people they are intended!
First and foremost – your content needs to be ah-mazing! And you need a subject line to match – otherwise your emails may end up in junk.
As the initiator of an email, when you send an email to a recipient, it goes through a few steps before arriving in the recipient’s mailbox. The steps involved in scrutinising these emails ensure that:
- It verifies your identity
- It confirms your email is void of malicious sites and contents
- It also confirms your email is spam free
Spam is an email sent to a receiver without seeking consent. Before any email gets to a recipient, it goes through the spam-filtering process – this process assesses the recipient’s server and location and also the information contained in the mail.
However, there are some other reasons why a recipient server will recognise your email as spam or junk; these reasons include:
Public URL shorteners
When sending an email, avoid using public URL shorteners. Short URL is what spammers use most of the time to hide links that direct to spam sites. Sending your email with a shortened URL would link your mail to a million other spam emails.
Avoid spam trigger words
When composing an email to a client, avoid spam trigger words – although, there are no comprehensive list on which words to avoid, words like member, sale, for free or act now are spam triggers.
When providing a link in your email, avoid placing entire URLs in the body of your message as this would trigger off spam alerts.
Be consistent
When sending an email, try to make your text as compatible as possible. Using many different colors of text, different font sizes, random text bolding or purposeful word misspelling could trigger a spam alert and reduce the likelihood of your email getting unscathed to its recipient.
Include a text-only version
When sending HTML emails, it’s easy for your email to end up in the spam folder. To avoid this, add a text-only version of your email – or 20 per cent images at most and at least 80 per cent text. If your email contains more of an image, your message would likely get marked as spam.
Copying from HTML
Before sending an email, clicking copying from your HTML in the message setting makes it easier for plain text to match HTML.
Set up a whitelist
Setting up a whitelist involves you sending an email to your clients, asking them to whitelist your sending address and mark the email NOT spam. Doing this ensures that your email doesn’t get classified as spam
Conclusion
There are other reasons why your mail will get marked as spam, but these few are the primary reasons. Just always remember to create really useful and helpful information for your audiences.
If you are having trouble writing any type of content writing, including email content writing, have a look at the tools you are using and the get some structures in place to help you.
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