Most digital marketers know that bulk email offers incredible value when used to its full potential. But unsolicited and often harmful messaging, commonly known as spam, can slow the road to success for those who are using bulk email compliantly. Is there hope for bulk email marketing? The answer is yes. And here’s what you can do to ensure your legitimate emails land in the inbox.
Legitimate Bulk Email Marketing vs Spam
Spam filters on today’s email clients catch many harmful messages before they get to recipients’ inboxes. For example, filters on Gmail currently block 99.9% of spam, phishing, and malware-carrying messages.
But these powerful filters can sometimes over-deliver and unintentionally frustrate legitimate marketers by flagging honest emails as spam. Fortunately, there are some active steps you can take to keep your messaging out of the bin. Let’s look at five proven ways of doing this.
1. Get Verifiable Permission from Your Audience
Because bulk email is often used for direct marketing, you’ll need to get clear and explicit permission from your audience before you start sending them content this way. In addition, if the regulator ever enquires about your data, you’ll need to be able to provide verifiable proof that recipients opted in for your messaging.
When you’ve covered this, your emails are far less likely to end up in the spam folder. That said, your audience may still view your emails as spammy under some circumstances. What more can you do?
2. Send Only When Necessary & Stay Consistent
Even if your audience loves your content, you can hurt your campaigns by sending too often. Try keeping it to once a week if you’re a prolific content creator, but never send content that’s not worth sharing, i.e., prioritise quality (or value) over quantity.
We also recommend that you use a content calendar and strategy to keep your sending times consistent. If you don’t, your audience could forget who you are and mistakenly mark your emails as spam.
One way of avoiding new subscriber churn is by interacting with them as soon as possible, just after they subscribe to your list, using a welcome email.
3. Know & Consistently Manage Your Reputation
Good deliverability often boils down to a quality email reputation. If your campaigns are regularly flagged as spam, then the next regrettable step is blacklisting. But this is completely avoidable through a combination of database hygiene and domain verification.
The first step is maintaining healthy lists. Clear non-compliant data from your contact lists to avoid emailing people who don’t want to receive your content. This is a proactive way to avoid unhappy recipients marking your messaging as spam or even reporting you to the authorities for a data privacy violation.
On the domain verification side, it also pays to have Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) authentication in place. These frameworks help recipient email servers to verify whether you’re sending from a legitimate IP address associated with your business. They also give a strong signal that your messaging hasn’t been tampered with.
Bulk email deliverability depends on a range of security and compliance processes working together in the background. Get a more detailed picture of what’s involved in our Email Delivery Guide.
4. Avoid Suspicious & Generic Subject Lines
Some phrases, like “Free Money”, are strongly associated with spam, and can draw the attention of filters when used in your email subject lines. Other word combinations are less overt, and how spammy they appear is often a matter of how generic and over-used they are.
It’s better to play it safe by using synonyms and more original formulations in your emails. Here’s a list of common spam trigger words and terms.
As a marketer, you need your bulk emails to stand out from the crowd. Prompting action and grabbing readers’ attention is key. Find out how in our Guide to Effective Email Marketing.
5. Don’t Over-Use Images in Your Bulk Emails
Adding a good ratio of images to your emails can make them more engaging, but overdoing it could hurt your deliverability. Spam filters have become more advanced and are better at classifying image-only emails. The issue is that readers have very little to engage with in image-only emails, making them more likely to be marked as spam.
An additional factor is that image-only emails cannot be read by screen readers and are less accessible than ones with more prominent copy. This limitation makes them more likely to be marked as spam by readers who depend on accessibility tools.
Lastly, the file size of image-only emails can cause deliverability issues since large embedded image files require more computing power to send and tend to cause queuing. Once delivered, you’ll also be forcing recipients to download the image before they can read your email.
Bulk Email is an Effective Channel
Maintaining excellent deliverability is a continuous and holistic effort that draws on good content creation practice, effective database management, and stellar email reputation, to name a few. Use the techniques above to improve your deliverability and encourage engagement in your bulk email campaigns.
