Important!
The sending of marketing emails may be automatically disabled due to high rates of undelivered emails and/or entry into spam. The percentage of delivered emails must be at least 95%, and the percentage of spam complaints must be no more than 0.5%.
To make your emails more likely to end up in the inbox, there are a number of email provider requirements you need to follow. First, check the points below.
Administrative requirements
Base
The email address base must be honestly collected, and subscribers must subscribe to your mailings voluntarily. Don't send emails to customers if they haven't requested it.
We strongly recommend against using a purchased base or someone else's base of recipients. Using such databases may harm your reputation, resulting in complaints from recipients.
Unsubscription
Users should always be able to unsubscribe from your mailing list at any time. The unsubscription button must be functional and visible. Place an unsubscrption button in every email. If visual editor is disabled, use:
<unsubscribe>Unsubscribe in 1 click</unsubscribe>.
If the unsubscription button is not clear in the email, or the user could not find it, they may decide to mark your emails as spam. This could also damage your reputation.
Unsubscription is beneficial to both subscribers and the sender, as the subscriber does not receive unnecessary emails, and the sender does not waste time with an uninterested audience. It is also important for avoiding problems with mail providers.
Keeping your subscriber base clean
It is important to keep your subscriber base clean. We recommend that you periodically clean the database using email validators. They will help to identify inactive users, spam traps and other problematic addresses.
Validators:
Working with the subscriber base
It is important to constantly monitor the activity of subscribers.
Over time, even in the cleanest databases, some subscribers may become mute (or 'lost') and will stop responding to email communications.
Why 'lost' subscribers need to be identified:
- They can harm your general statistics and trust among email providers.
- Many of these subscribers will continue to mark messages as spam rather than unsubscribe completely.
- They can cost the store money as a result of marketing and email costs.
Therefore, it is important to understand the reasons why some subscribers become mute. There are a number of explanations:
- the email address has changed and the individual has not updated their email preferences;
- the subscriber registered using an address that they do not use very often;
- the subscriber is no longer interested in the products offered by your store;
- the subscriber has no interest in the mailing or perceives them as too monotonous;
- the themes of your emails do not motivate the subscriber to open the email;
- the time between different emails is too large. After a while, a subscriber may simply forget that they once subscribed to your mailings
How can these triggers be avoided?
- You can try to reactivate a base of inactive subscribers. If the subscriber does not open the last 5-10 emails (this depends on the email frequency, and this, in turn, depends on the type of product and service that you offer), then your marketing strategies may need to be re-arranged or your customer base re-shuffled.
- Send relevant content for specific customer segments in your customer base. Targetted and personalised emails will enhance the salience of your marketing and may prompt inactive subscribers to become more responsive.
If it is not possible to restore the activity of subscribers, then they should be manually unsubscribed. Things to remember: Shortened links
Shortened links are often used by spammers. As such, email providers are more likely to send these emails to the spam folder. Check for the presence pf shortened links in your templates.
Stop words
There are stop words that don't need to be used in a subject. For example, "FREE", "Sale!!" and so on. Over-using certain types of punctuation (such as multiple exclamation marks) may also lead to the email being placed in the spam folder.
Post-masters
Postmasters help analyse bulk mailings. They are useful for understanding key email metrics, such as email deliverability, actions taken by recipients, spam metrics, etc.
Major postmasters:
[AOL postmaster] (https://postmaster.info.aol.com/).
Technical requirements
Authentication
You must have SPF, DKIM and DMARC digital signatures configured. They help email providers identify you. Without these, your emails are likely to end up in spam. Read more about digital signatures in the following article. Blacklists
Mail providers will track whether your IP or domain has been included in a blacklist of bad/spam senders. Remember to check for the presence or absence of your data in these blacklists, for example, using https://mxtoolbox.com.
Testing emails
Prior to sending, test the email using the service https://www.mail-tester.com/. This will show the likelihood of your email reaching customers' inboxes.