Many businesses use email marketing as a channel to communicate campaigns. The number of unwanted emails handled by Google is very large, approximately half of the emails sent are spamaccording to The Tech Report. There will always be a percentage of emails that end up in the unwanted folder, but it is in our power to improve the situation.
First of all, do we know exactly what spam is?
What is spam?
"Spam (in English, junk mail) refers to unsolicited messages, mainly of advertising type, and sent in bulk. The most commonly used form of delivery is email, but it can also be sent via instant messaging programs or social networks.".
What characterizes spam is that reaches all over the worldThe reason for this is usually that companies buy databases with contacts or reuse old lists. Also very characteristic of these messages are spelling mistakes, exaggerated use of capital letters and exclamation marks, different fonts than usual in the subject line, urgent phrases and strange senders.
But our mailings are perfectly legal, why do we end up in spam if we don't do any of these previous practices? There are many reasons why your emails end up unopened and end up in spam. Let's learn some of these reasons and how to prevent them from happening to us.
Why do we end up in the spam folder and how can we avoid it?
As of this February, Google has started to follow stricter rules to detect spam and block emails. Gmail blocks some mails for being blacklisted (if a few people mark our communications as spam, we are already blacklisted) or for not following the new requirements for bulk senders.
To avoid blocking emails and ending up on a blacklist, we must follow a series of requirements:
- The spam rate must be less than 0.3%. In order to control this, there is a tool called Google Postmaster Tool which shows the rate of spam complaints.
- Very important is send communications to active accountsthat is to say, that they expect to receive our emails. This is also something that will benefit us when it comes to achieving objectives, since we will be impacting a specific target that we believe may be interested in what we send.
- Facilitate unsubscriptionin both the footer and subject line of the email.
- Authenticate e-mails and implement the DNS correctly. It is also important to add a DMARC record to your domain's DNS to improve mail capacity and better pass authenticity checks.
- Double option when subscribingWhen someone subscribes to our newsletter, he/she must receive an email confirming that he/she really wants to receive communications from the website to which he/she has subscribed.
Connectif has a series of best practices to follow that will help us not to end up in that unwanted folder. It is necessary to have a defined strategy and optimize the mailings in the best possible way.
To this end, the reputation of the server is very important. To have a good reputation we must have a consistency of sending, a clean email list without bounces, not to obtain contacts illegally and not to be on a blacklist.
We must also take into account the content of our emails. It must be relevant, so we must personalize our mailings. The design should follow the same line as the commerce website, also taking into account that the optimum should be a 60% text and a 40% images. We must also facilitate unsubscribing, as we have already mentioned, by placing an unsubscribe button in the footer and next to the subject line.
Finally, the segmentation is very important when sending mass mailings, since not everyone will be interested in the same email. We have to adapt to the needs of the contacts and their activity in terms of opening emails, purchases and behavior on the web.
If you want advice for it, at Geotelecom we have a team of Marketing Automation to make your email marketing campaigns a success. Contact us at and we will help you.
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