spam

Online marketing has well and truly changed the way people interact with brands and shop online. The ease of purchasing products directly from your phone or desktop means marketers are looking to capture attention within that short period and space. E-commerce has changed the way people behave, and emails have become a major driving force for revenue and sales. 

More than 93% of B2B marketers prefer emails as a form of communication, with the total number of active email IDs having touched the 5.6 billion mark. Marketers have understood the value of ROI that an email can bring where for $1 spent, emails can generate a revenue of $38! 

Spam is, however, the downside of emails. It is when a user marks your email as useless and sends it to the spam folder. 45% of all emails sent get marked as spam – that’s about 14.5 billion emails a day!

If you’re a brand looking to get your numbers up online, avoiding email spam is an absolute necessity. You have to understand what email spam is and how you can avoid falling into the same trap. 

What is Email Spam?

Email spam is generally deemed as mauls that aren’t relevant to an inbox. The average person gets around 45 emails a day, and they feel that some of these emails aren’t relevant to their likes and interests. Companies have started taking note, with 52% of companies claiming that reducing spam was one of their top priorities for the year. 

Spam emails reduce confidence from the public and their trust in the internet in general. Spam also reduces system safety and productivity, which gives you more reason to avoid it as a brand. 

What Are the Risks Involved With Email Spam?

Spam can have a negative effect and brings down the value of a company in the eyes of a customer. They may feel an email is cumbersome and a hindrance to tackling. There are plenty of anti-spam filters as well, which have been introduced to break the occurrence of spam emails. 

They block different types of emails, which can be deemed as spam as well without letting them go straight to the inbox folder. Spam emails contribute close to $20.5 billion in reduced productivity, in addition to technical expenses as well. That’s a large amount of money spent on something irrelevant and useless. The loss per employee is also thought to be around $1,934.

If you’d like to improve the customer retention rate and reduce the open and click rates, as well as spam rates, then you must understand why emails are sent to spam. This helps avoid future mishaps and creates a pleasant experience to enjoy. A high number of spam emails doesn’t mean you must get stressed out. Focus on good content, and you’ll be able to crawl your way back. Follow the necessary guidelines and avoid the more common mistakes, and you’re good to go. 

Reasons Why Emails Go to Spam?

While there are multiple reasons why emails get sent to spam, it is crucial to take care of the primary reasons first to avoid falling out of the customer’s inbox from the start –

People marking emails as spam. This is one of the primary reasons people mark emails as spam. Every time you’re marked as spam, your domain gets blacklisted with the reputation taking a hit. Email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, and more mark your address as spam and also notify the other providers about this at the same time. 

Spam complaints contribute to direct user signals about the mails, which are unsolicited, and a rate of even 0.5% is considered high. 

How to tackle this?

There are many service providers such as SendX and Mailchimp that remove the addresses which have been marked as spam. They detect if these emails have been marked and ensure none of the other emails are sent to users to protect your domain reputation.

No physical address. If you’re an email marketer, you need to play by the rules of the FTC or the Federal Trade Commission. They have the rules in place to check for physical addresses on all of the emails that are sent. You need to check the physical address for every email you send because it also plays in the customer’s mind as they might consider your company to be fake. 

You can add your brand’s address at the bottom of the email that you send to validate your presence in the e-commerce market. It doesn’t take much to do, and it can bring you the sales you need, just with a single change. 

How to tackle this? 

You must register the company with a valid postal address, and the process doesn’t take more than a few days to complete. It will help in sending out useful emails that are opened directly by your audience base. 

Weak headlines. Headlines play a significant role in the status and life of an email. The headlines are one of the first things a reader notices when they receive a mail, and up to 69% of emails are marked as spam, based on the headline content alone

How to tackle this? 

You must avoid using trigger words as well as integrate certain practices into the content of the email, including:

  • Reducing the pure discount and sales content but creating compelling content that the reader can take something away from
  • Reduction of capital letters and exclamation marks which can come across as overly excited.

Using unsupported CSS attributes or HTML tags. Using unsupported HTML tags means your emails will get sent to spam over the long term as they can’t be appropriately rendered in the reader’s inbox. They won’t be able to bypass filters and can get identified as spam. Web HTML and Email HTML are not the same things. There are many HTML tags and CSS attributes that are not supported by major email clients. 

How to tackle this? 

An excellent way to address this is by creating emails that are made on HTML tables as this ensures emails don’t get sent to spam and mark a delightful experience for a reader. 

Sending frequent emails in a short time. Whenever a new domain is created, you must ensure they are sent out regularly, but not so frequently that they become annoying for the reader. Avoid sending many emails within a short period, as this is one of the typical signatures of a spammer.

Sending many emails over a new domain means they end up in the spam folder, and your domain reputation ends up taking a hit as well.  

How to tackle this? 

Whenever you formulate a new domain, you must organically build lists that get your readability factor up with customers. These filters won’t let your emails go through because such new domains are seen with a sense of suspicion. 

To Wrap Up

Now that we have covered the essential tips above, the list of avoiding spam is extensive, and you can read it all here in this link. You’ll be able to receive useful tips and tricks to avoid sending your email to spam. It would help if you also chose a reliable email service provider that allows you to find the right mix of flexibility and content.

Keep trying and innovating till you hit that sweet spot, and the revenue will come in! Good luck!

Rohan Mendiratta helps small businesses and marketers to build and engage their audience via SendX: Email Marketing Software. Say hi to him on Twitter and LinkedIn

Spam stock photo by Feng Yu/Shutterstock