Member Article

Avoiding the spam filter: How to do email marketing right

In 2015, 205 billion emails were sent and received each day. 122 billion, just over half, were sent by business, with many of them being email marketing, advertising or newsletters intended to increase brand visibility and encourage sales.

Big number statistics will confirm what you already know from checking your own inbox: people get a lot of emails. But that doesn’t mean they all reach the right inbox, or get read.

So how can you make sure your marketing emails get seen? How do you send an email that will avoid spam filters, and drive customers to your website or service? The odds are stacked against your little email; but if you follow these simple tips, you can send effective marketing emails every time.

Send your emails to the right people

Finding your best audience should always be where you start your email marketing campaign. If you get your emails to the right people and your sales and visibility could skyrocket. By finding a targeted audience, rather than trying to reach the biggest breadth of people, will help reduce the campaign’s costs, cut time wasting and increase overall effectiveness.

There most straightforward way of finding target lists is simply buying a mailing list from a reputable seller. Good mailing list providers will have put in effort to create lists tailored to different audiences, businesses and levels. Whether you know who you want, or are looking for a bespoke list of emails and phone numbers, these mailing list how-to guides from Electric Marketing should tell you everything you need to know to get started.

Another way to build a list of interested potential buyers is to encourage people to sign-up to your mails via a contact form on your website. With this technique, you might get fewer emails, but those who do sign up are far more likely to engage and convert. You can increase your signup rate by offering an incentive, such as a discount code or free trial.

Make the emails unmissable

Getting your emails to the right recipient is the first step, but it is equally important to send emails people will actually want to read. Even if you don’t know anything about your potential readers other than who they are, you can still create an attractive mail. The best way to do this is to create extremely high quality content.

People are unlikely to open marketing emails that promise the impossible, with eye-catching yet eye-rolling subject lines. These emails risk being picked up by spam filters or banished to the junk folder at first sight. Don’t pitch your business in your emails; offer value exchange.

Trade your valuable knowledge and expertise for your readers’ valuable patience and time. The kind of content people want to read must be light on the words and heavy on the visuals. Videos and images hold a reader’s attention, and offer them something as useful as it is digestible. They can also be a brief respite from the monotony of checking your emails.

Break your lists into groups by location or interest

If you have the time and resources, and once you’ve bought or collated your list of email addresses, try breaking your mailing list down into smaller constituent groups. This could be based on interests, where on the website they completed (such as from certain types of products) or based on geography.

Use the information gathered from this smaller group to created tailored mails, information and offers. This is particularly useful when sending bulk mails but distinguishing between those who’ve purchased from you before and new customers. Those who’ve converted won’t need to be convinced, they’ll be more interested in new stock or upgrades.

Autoresponders allow you to write several emails at once and send them out over a period of time. If a reader enjoys ‘part 1’ of an email series, you can bet they’re going to read ‘part 5’. Or if they open mails about a certain service over another, use that data to send them marketing more curated to what they’ve read in the past.

Learn from analytics

Email marketing gives you an almost unrivalled level of analytical data to absorb and learn from during your campaign. Analytical tools can tell you everything, from how many people opened an email to how long they spent reading it, whether they eventually deleted it, and, crucially, whether they clicked through to your site.

Learning from analytical data helps you adapt and refine your marketing campaigns as you go along. Try using different subject lines or sending different videos to different segments of your audience. The resulting click through rates can give you insight into what kind of emails you should be sending and to whom. Your specialised mailing list (or lists) and your differences in content can be clear variables that help you work on your emails until they are the perfect marketing tools.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Caitlyn Stevens .