*This is the second article in our ‘Inbox Unlocked’ series. If you missed it, the first was about the General Data Protection Regulation “GDPR” and what it means for you
## How to avoid the junk folder
Across all age groups and demographics, almost everyone prefers an email – more than 70% of people say it’s their preferred method of communication. As marketeers will know, it’s also proven to be exceptionally cost effective, with an average of 21 times return on investment.
However, 75% of emails are classed as spam. And by spam, we mean *any email that is irrelevant, unexpected or unwanted.* With improvements to email spam filter technology, this is how your recipients are defining spam.
So, how do you make the most of your email campaigns and avoid the junk folder? Let’s start with how well your emails are currently doing.
## What should you measure?
Email marketing measurements fall into the following categories:
1. **Positive engagement** – like opens, clicks and shares. Clicks can be measured either by click-to-open rate (the percentage of people who opened that then went on to click), or by click-through rate (the percentage of subscribers overall who clicked a link).
2. **Negative engagement ** – like complaints and unsubscribes.
3. **Deliverability ** – meaning how many emails actually reached the inbox. This is most commonly tracked in terms of bounces. Hard bounces are lost causes (uncontactable addresses) but soft bounces will generally only be removed from your database if someone soft bounces three times in a row.
## What’s a good open rate? And how many bounces are too many?
To an extent it’s unique to you, but it’s really helpful to look at your industry and see how you’re faring compared to the wider world. Email benchmark reports (link: https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?htmlfid=UVL12406USEN text: like this one from IBM) are free to download and generally track a wide range of industries in detail.
## Positive engagement
If you’re struggling with positive engagement, these three things will increase your chances of your recipients responding positively to your emails.
1. **Think customer first**
Who are you sending your emails to? What do you already know about them? Check your database to see what you can find out. For example, what kind of content would they like to receive? They’re going to be turned off by an offer for a product they’ve already bought. They’re going to have no interest in your service for the automotive industry, if they’re working in aerospace. You may know more than you think. The information already in your database, such as job title, company, and location can tell you a lot.
2. **Think through the full journey**
Your email will be no use to anyone if it doesn’t go anywhere. Think about what you want your recipient to do, and where that’s likely to lead them. If you want them to sign up to something, take them through to a sleek, quick, purpose-built landing page that has all the information they need, doesn’t deviate from the task in hand and doesn’t lead them to get lost on your website.
You want to create a fantastic, easy experience that leaves a positive impression of your brand – not disappointment or annoyance about an opportunity not fulfilled.
Most importantly, make sure the links in your emails work. Test them thoroughly before you press send.
3. **What’s the trigger?**
Lastly, think about what the trigger is for your email. Messages that are relevant to a particular point in time, or follow on from a relevant piece of communication get the best success rates. A follow-up email saying thank you or asking for feedback after an event is likely to get a much better response the day after than a week later. Or an email that offers further guidance or goodies after someone downloaded information from your website is highly likely to keep them engaged.
Don’t be too persistent though, or that’s likely to turn into negative feedback…
## What can cause negative engagement?
Negative engagement is about how spammy, intrusive or unhelpful your email is. You want to avoid tactics that lead to someone not opening or clicking on your email, or even making them click unsubscribe or marking your email as spam. Negative engagement like this has the potential to place you on a blacklist, making it more difficult for you to send emails in the future. Here are a few points to consider.
1. ****Relevance
****In essence, the inverse of everything we’ve just talked about for positive engagement. If your email has no relevance to the people receiving it, they will react negatively.
2. ****Timing
****If you send too many emails in a short space of time, people are likely to react negatively. You need to strike the right balance so you’re useful, not annoying.
3. ****Repetition
****Similarly, if you regularly send the same kind of content over and over again, your subscribers are likely to get bored, so make sure every email you send is as relevant as possible.
4. ****Display
****An area that people often overlook is how well your email is displayed when someone receives it.
Did you know that at a conservative estimate there are approximately 15,000 potential renderings of every email you send? That means subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle differences when people receive the same email. This can range from a button on the left instead of the right, to the wrong font, to the email just turning out blank.
Forty-three per cent of people will delete your email if it doesn’t work on their smartphone. So, testing your emails in multiple email clients is crucial when sending out campaigns. You can use a tool such as (link: https://litmus.com/ text: Litmus), which quickly and easily tests for faults across a wide range of email clients. Or you can test it out yourselves on different people’s phones and computers.
However, don’t get too hung up on making your email perfect in every single email client. Look at which clients are used most often. For example, if very few of your recipients use Gmail, and there’s a minor fault on there that doesn’t get in the way of the message (such as fonts displayed slightly bigger than your design), then you can probably let that go. But if your email looks completely broken a mobile phone, you should try to fix it.
## Deliverability
Once you’ve got the right message, and you’re sending it to the right people at the right time, you can still be let down at the last hurdle: getting the email into your recipient’s inbox.
There are some things that you simply can’t affect. A soft bounce can be caused by a recipient having server issues at their end, for instance. But there are some things that you can check as an email sender to improve and protect your deliverability.
1. **Email quality**
Simply said, if your emails are of a good quality they’re more likely to get through.
Thorough testing and immaculate coding will improve deliverability but quality includes content too. There is a blacklist of terms that you should use with care, such as ‘free’, ‘urgent’, ‘why pay more?’, or even ‘remove wrinkles’. These are all more likely to set off spam filters.
It’s also best to make sure you don’t embed text as part of a flat image, as some research suggests a good image-to-text ratio (basically, as many readable characters of text as possible) will make your email less spammy.
** **
2. **Data cleanliness and sender reputation**
These two factors are interlinked. If your data is unclean, you will get more hard bounces, but you’re also likely to get low levels of engagement and lots of people unsubscribing. Poor performance marks you out as a spammy sender, which damages your sender reputation. This increases the likelihood of your emails being classed as junk. The more your emails fail to deliver, and the more people who unsubscribe or mark your emails as spam, the worse your reputation will get, making it harder for you to get through to your subscribers. It’s a vicious cycle.
Make sure you don’t keep sending to people who repeatedly bounce, keep those databases clean, and maximise your chances by collecting the correct data in the first place.
The next in our series on email marketing focusses on the all-important database itself – the foundation of your email marketing strategy. How do you collect data? What data do you collect? How do you keep it clean? And how can you rejuvenate your database when performance is bad?
*If we’ve piqued your interest, and you want to talk about your email strategy, or if you need some help writing emails people want to subscribe (and stay subscribed) to, just drop a line to *(email: hello@superdream.co.uk text: hello@superdream.co.uk)* or call 01527 573 770.*