Here’s a jarring statistic – The average office worker will have 121 emails hit their inbox daily.
That’s an information firehose. If any email rubs such a rushed user the wrong way by being spammy, the user will likely not want to receive it again.
As an email marketer, your newsletter faces stiff competition for scant attention. You want not to appear pushy or spammy if you’re to win their attention.
Keep reading to find out why emails go to spam and what you can do to prevent joining that list.
1. Not Understanding Your Target Audience
At the core of any marketing endeavor, you are simply looking for the right people to offer the solution to a problem. When you find someone struggling with something for which you have an answer, you’ve hit the bull’s eye.
That’s how the target audience fit works. If you achieve the right target audience fit, you stimulate high customer engagement. As a result, subscribers will find value in your email campaigns and check them out.
When you lack target audience fit, though, it can really misfire. You’ll keep sending out campaign after campaign, and all your subscribers will experience is white noise.
Since each email continues not to make sense to the subscriber, they will inevitably mark it as spam. It’s therefore critical to pair your desire to grow your email subscriber list with connecting with more subscribers whom you serve effectively.
That way, your core value proposition will hold water with them, leading to them prioritizing your emails whenever they hit their inbox.
2. Circumventing Buy-In
One of the unique aspects of email marketing that also make for its success is its permission-based nature.
If you drop an unwanted email time and again in a subscriber’s inbox, you’ll eventually get marked as spam. Email is a core productivity tool for many, and having it fill up with junk time after time triggers extreme displeasure.
To sidestep this, you need to find a way to generate buy-in from a subscriber so that you can leverage permission-based marketing dynamics.
As a cardinal rule, never opt to buy email dresses to build up your mailing list. It may seem like a viable tool, but the negative perception it generates will adversely impact your business.
And if that’s not enough, the government could also come after you. Buying email addresses can potentially lead you to violate the CAN-SPAM Act. Unless you have $16,000 lying around to pay for fines per email, you may want to avoid violating this rule.
A compelling yet straightforward method to get subscriber buy-in is to use an opt-in form on your site. You can go a step further and trade value for a potential subscriber’s email.
For example, you can whip up a valuable asset such as an ebook or white paper to give for free in return for an email address. Executed well, this can have the dual effect of getting your subscriber buy-in and earning you more trust with them.
When you come across a lead’s contact information, don’t email them without consent. Instead, send the lead a personalized email to nurture them into a subscriber.
3. Ignoring Email Marketing Best Practices
Sometimes marketing emails end up in the spam folder due to a lack of adhering to email best practices. It pays to continually assess your email newsletter operations and spy out instances where you may be slacking the rules on best practices.
For example, an ambitious email marketer may overlook the necessity of eliminating disposable email addresses from their database in their quest to grow.
While this helps your list grow, it’s trading an extremely short-term ‘perk’ for a longer-term problem. Disposable email addresses inevitably tank your reputation (as this article explains), and relying on them to grow is unwise.
Likewise, sending your email campaign to an address that doesn’t whitelist will get you marked as spam. Consequently, you should make it a habit to request subscribers to add your address to their contacts.
Doing so ensures you are on their whitelist as email platform companies assume that if a sender is in your contacts, it’s likely not spam. Consider including whitelisting instructions in the welcome email you send new subscribers to help them add you to their whitelist from the get-go.
4. Long Absences From Subscriber Inboxes
Once you get subscriber buy-in to send you emails, you shouldn’t rest on your laurels. Many email marketing professionals tend to treat buy-in as the end goal. That’s not the case.
Your goal should be to keep being top-of-mind with subscribers, so they don’t forget your brand. When you send emails inconsistently, it’s easy for subscribers to forget you. The next time you hit their inbox, they won’t recognize your brand.
That only serves for them to treat you as a spammy sender.
A convenient way to combat this is to make your branding consistent. Let the brand identifiers that subscribers see in their inbox have consistent markers as what you use on your site and/or social media handles.
In the few seconds, it takes for a subscriber to assess whether your email is signal or noise, you’ll have higher odds of getting them to connect the dots and click through.
Personalizing emails is another way to help subscribers remember you, so they don’t associate your email with spam. Along the same line, you should add a small section in your email to remind them how they got onto your newsletter.
As a failsafe, you also need to feature an easily accessible unsubscribe button. Should a subscriber completely not recall you, they should find an easy way to get off your list rather than resort to marking your email as spam.
Most users intuitively look for the unsubscribe link at the bottom of an email, and that’s a good place to put it. You don’t need to draw unnecessary attention to this link lest you lose more subscribers than necessary. You just need to assure subscribers that it’s there.
Why Emails Go to Spam and What You Can Do About It
Every email marketer needs to evaluate how they connect with subscribers to make the most of their reach. As such, you need to continually investigate why emails go to spam to build industry-leading email marketing habits that help bolster your reach.
Sending out email amidst the noise in digital marketing is not for the faint of heart. Our website features valuable and practical technology tips and tricks to help entrepreneurs learn how to leverage the online landscape. Check out more of our content to learn how you can sharpen your digital marketing skills to grow your brand.
