Improve Your Email Deliverability With Better Content

You work hard on your emails. You research, carefully craft them with thoughtful words, and artfully design and build them in your ESP. It takes a lot of time to send a good email. So much goes into it! So, it is really disappointing when we marketers check out the results and find that most of those emails got trapped by spam filters.

It is tricky to figure out why this happens sometimes. Your sender reputation is impacted by many things. Even if you are doing everything you should, like making sure your lists actually opted into what they are getting, authenticating your email domain, and maintaining a proper IP allocation, you could still end up marked as spam.  A lot of what gets you flagged for spam actually has to do with your content. Here are my top 3 ways to give your content the best shot it has at making it through the spam filter.

Stop using these words in subject lines

Have you ever looked into your spam folder just for fun? Or maybe you were checking for an email you were supposed to receive but never did? Well, if you have you would have been overwhelmed by the number of subject lines that read like this. “TIME IS RUNNING OUT. Get your FREE (insert any item) NOW!!” It’s pretty obvious why these obnoxious little guys find their way in here, but did you know there is a pretty long list of words that you should avoid if you want to up your chances of making the inbox cut?

Check out this huge list by Prospect.io. These 455 terms are the most flagged for spam, so it is best to avoid them if you can. But don’t worry if you need some of them. Context matters when it comes to the inbox. Just use your best judgment and use them sparingly.

Segment your audience with the data you already have

Any marketer worth their salt knows that one message does not fit all. Consumers and businesses are all different and they expect to be treated as such. With today’s marketing technology, recipients expect highly targeted, relevant, and personalized messages that help meet their goals, needs, and challenges.  

Basically, when you send an email that contains no relevant content to the recipient, they probably will not open, won’t click, and if they do open they may even mark as spam. These things all have a negative impact on your online reputation. But don’t worry, the opposite is also true! When you send segmented and personalized emails your messages resonate with your audience. They will open, click and even mark your messages as important– all good for your deliverability.

If you don’t already, now is the time to start segmenting your lists with the data you currently have. Whether it is based on interest, location, or some other criteria, craft messages that fit that particular audience. When you are ready for more sophisticated segmentation look at tools that can help you! MessageGears is one example of an ESP that wins at segmentation. They even have the ability for you to pull in dynamic content based on demographic information.
The more relevant content you can serve your audience, the more relevant your emails become. And with this, your deliverability will just get better and better.

Stay consistent with your branding!

You really want to control all the content within your email. Making sure you’re staying consistent with your branding and not changing your sending domain is really important to your reputation!

It helps if you can stick to your own domain from sending all the way through to linking. Kurt Diver, Manager, Email Delivery, Expert Services at SendGrid, says that a “higher concentration of a single domain carries more weight” and it can help you improve your online reputation as long as you are doing all the other things right; “It is kind of a snowball effect.”

Your online reputation is based on EVERY domain you include in your emails. So be careful. Think twice about using links that are not your own in your email. Even if they are just shortened by a third party, they can negatively impact your online reputation.

Get more engagement on your emails

If you do the second tip, this will inevitably follow, but there are some other ways you can get a quick win or two in the click-through department.

If you break it down to the most basic element, a click means interest. Sending interesting emails that your audience, opens, reads and clicks improve your deliverability because, as mentioned above, you will be less likely to get marked as spam. This is a hard task to accomplish with just static, boring emails. Long gone are the days where ordinary emails wowed consumers and businesses. You need to go above and beyond with your content. One way to do this is by using interactive content in your emails.

Interactive content in email is a great way to encourage action on your offers. You can delight your audience and show them something they have never seen before. But it does more than entertain. Lots of interactive content options for email also include the use of marketing psychology. Using psychological principles like curiosity and FOMO can supercharge a recipient’s urge to click and they will be more likely to join your brand’s discovery journey.

It isn’t the most glamorous topic out there, but deliverability certainly is important. Email deliverability can be a make or break for companies, especially since email is still the number one marketing channel out there. So stop letting the spam filter get you down, and make your email content less spammy, more relevant, and finally more fun!

Want to chat about how Zembula can help you improve your email deliverability?

Schedule a free email marketing consult with one of our experts.