Our top 3 best practices to avoid landing in spam

Struggling with low engagement in your email campaigns? Worried your emails are going unread in the spam folder?

Email deliverability is key to the success of your campaigns. In this blog, we'll cover three essential practices to ensure your emails hit the inbox and engage your audience effectively. We'll also answer some frequently asked questions at the end.

Let's dive in.

How to avoid emails going to spam

Below we’ve broken down three steps that include clear action points for you to follow. 

1. Find out if you’ve been blacklisted

Your first goal is to find out whether or not you’ve been blacklisted. 

If you get on the blacklist of email service providers, you’re guaranteed to lose access to potential leads and returning customers. You’re likely to have been blacklisted if you often send email campaigns that are filled with words considered spam, frequently send mass email campaigns, or, haven’t gotten consent before sending emails. 

Blacklisting can have a negative effect on email marketing campaigns. As Mailchimp suggests, it can cut off your access to new leads generated by surveys, website activity and lists of qualified leads sold by marketing service providers. 

Action points:

1. Check if you've been blacklisted. Check your status here. 
2. Assess the quality of your IP. Evaluate your IP here. 
3. Conduct spam tests and assess the effectiveness of your emails. Use tools like Glockapps and Mail Reach to understand the percentage of emails landing in spam based on recipient location and email providers.

Best practices: 

1. Stop buying email lists. Instead, use the folkX Chrome extension to collect new leads and folk’s Contact Enrichment feature to get email addresses. 
2. Segment your email lists so that you can design email campaigns for each target audience.

2. Review your data

Your second goal is to figure out how you can keep your bounce rate under 5%. 

The average bounce rate is 2-5%. A bounce rate of 5% or more could allude to a problem with your email list, deliverability or sender reputation. If your bounce rate is higher than 5% it’s time for you to review your email lists and verify the emails on them.

Action points:

1. Review your email campaign’s analytics: look into the delivery and open rates of your previous campaigns directly in folk.
2. Verify email addresses before sending campaigns. Leverage tools like Hunter for efficient verification.
3. Search your lists for typos such as ‘.co’ and ‘.con’

Best practices: 

1. Always send email campaigns to business addresses of individuals (and not generic addresses).
2. Use folk data enrichment to get the most up-to-date data on your contacts.
3. Use LinkedIn for the best source of data, as people tend to regularly update their job position and company. Import search lists or individual profiles straight into folk, with the folkX Chrome extension.

3. Review your email content

Your third goal is to make sure that your email campaigns add value to your target audience. 

This means making sure that your email campaigns are not 100% sales-focused. 

To balance promotional and value-added email content, your emails need to be personalized to each target audience. Depending on your product or service and content strategy, consider topics such as monthly newsletters and new product features. 

Action points:

1. Build an email content calendar that balances promotional and value-added email content. Review your email marketing journeys including engagement, re-engagement and sales. 
2. Use folk’s AI feature ‘Magic Field’ to save time personalizing email campaigns to multiple recipients. 
3. Always personalize your emails (using folk variables). Incorporate custom variables, change syntax, and use diverse greetings to avoid the monotony of mass messaging. ‘Magic Field’ can also help with this.

Best practices:

1. Avoid using words considered spam in your subject line such as test, free, win.
2. Make sure your email is skimmable and optimise it with a mobile-first design. 

Frequently Asked Questions

Our in-house experts frequently answer questions about folk's email campaign feature. Here are their top tips for you to use.

1. How do I prevent bounces?

For hard bounces, when the email is permanently rejected because the email address is invalid or the email addresses don’t exist, you can use Bouncer to help you clean your list of leads and check for bounces (before sending your campaign).

2. How many emails should I send per day?

We recommend to stay under a quota of 200 emails per day.

3. How do I warm up my emails? 

Gradually introduce a new email address into mass emailing to avoid triggering spam filters. Use warm-up solutions like Mailreach to establish credibility over time.

Conclusion

Avoid the disappointment of landing in spam folders with folk. folk’s all-in-one CRM can help you build contact lists effortlessly and provide AI support to save you time personalizing your email campaigns. It can also help you keep an eye on your engagement rates, so you’ll always be aware of what’s performing well, and what needs improving. Try folk today, free.