How to avoid landing in the email spam folder

Do any of these sound familiar?

"I've not received my invitation yet."

"I've just registered and I haven't received a confirmation or my ticket."

"It was in my junk folder"

Deliverability - getting your email into the recipient's inbox

Event emails are an essential way of communicating with your audience. It's important to do everything you can do to make sure they land in the recipient's inbox. Here are some tips that will help you achieve that.

We'll cover the techie stuff first!

1. Authenticate your domain - this is a way to allow your email sending service (e.g. Mailchimp, Mitingu if you're a client, etc.) from you with your permission.

Domain authentication is done in the place where you bought it (e.g. GoDaddy, Namecheap, 123-reg, etc), by adding SPF and DKIM records to your DNS. It sounds complicated, but it's just a case of getting these from your mail sending service and adding them. If you're a Mitingu client, we can help with this.

These records tell the receiving email servers that the email is safe and sent from a reputable business.

2. A dedicated IP address

Most email service providers such as Mailchimp use shared IP addresses in order to maintain a good sender reputation and deliverability for all of their users. We do exactly the same at Mitingu.

If you're sending large volumes of emails per month (upwards of 20,000 for example) it might be worth looking at getting a dedicated IP address. This means that the IP address is only used for your business and no others. That means your reputation is solely in your hands and can't be influenced by other users.

It's not quite as simple as just buying a dedicated IP address and off you go, because it needs to be "warmed up" over a period of time to improve your reputation and deliverability.

If you're a Mitingu user and want to find out about a dedicated IP address, we're happy to organise it for you.

3. Cleanse your data

In general, there are two types of bounces:
Hard - this is usually where the email address doesn't exist or the server has blocked you
Soft - this is normally a temporary issue such as the receiving inbox is full, a message with file is too large or an out of office is on.

Too many bounces can damage your sender reputation and affect deliverability.

Make sure that your data is up to date and any records that have previously hard bounced are removed (Mitingu automatically stops sending to any email addresses that have previously hard bounced).

Validation tools can be the quickest and easiest way to cleanse your data.

4. Make it easy to unsubscribe

Unsubscribes don't affect your deliverability, but getting Spam complaints do!

Make it easy for people to unsubscribe if they don't want to receive any more emails from you by adding an unsubscribe link to all your emails.

5. Avoid "Spammy" subject lines and content

Subject lines can often trigger spam detectors which means your email can end up in the spam folder. Common things to avoid are using ALL CAPS, over punctuation!!!!???? and Re: and Fw: in the first send.

There are some really good lists of words/phrases to avoid, here's a useful one from Hubspot.

Here's a great free subject line tester tool subjectline.com. It will give you your score out of 100 and show you where it can be improved.

When it comes to the content, a lot of the same principles apply as in the subject line. It's good practice to personalise the content to the receiver, avoid red text (other colours are fine), use links to quality sites and avoid shortened URLs like bit.ly links (spammers like to hide content behind these types of links).

Make sure your content adds value to the person that is reading it. Email providers track how your recipients interact with your emails, including both their positive and negative actions.

Positive actions include: Opens, click-throughs, moving from the Promotions tab to the Primary tab (Gmail), marking email as "not spam" and adding the sender email address to their address book.

Negative actions include: Unopens, deleting your email prior to opening and marking them as spam.

Here is a good tool to use to spam test your email (it has a free version) mail-tester.com

There are some really good paid for spam test tools too, such as Litmus.

6. Add a recognisable and consistent send from name and email address

If you receive an email from a friend, you generally open it, right? You recognise and trust the sender.

The same applies if you're sending as a business. Use your name or a consistent business brand name as the "send from" name and your domain. If you send out event communications, you could use: "ABC Event Team" and eventsteam@abc.com.

Consistency is everything and doing this will help increase open rates and decrease the number of spam complaints.

All this leads to improved deliverability.