When using an email campaign, there are
- Best practices you cannot afford to ignore
- Common misconceptions using email for lead generation
- How to avoid lasting problems for your business
Our two primary concerns are:
- How to avoid spam filters
- How to avoid bounce
They both work towards each other’s benefit.
When it comes to email lists, and more particularly, generating these email lists, the process causes accuracy issues. If you can imagine all the different places we gather our data from – basically everywhere… we only suggest using our email addresses if your a professional emailer.
We provide emails for our data lists always free of charge, to be used as a bonus method for email outreach.
We provide email addresses only as a courtesy. If you’re going to send email addresses in scale – you must “verify” email addresses.
Ask yourself how many email addresses you have created, or used to sign up for things on the internet. The reason there are accuracy issues with emails in particular, relates to how easy it is for someone to provide fake or old email addresses. Also, when it comes to signing up for email subscriptions, do you always use the same one?
The vast majority of people have multiple emails for multiple purposes and the emails which are not readily used may be triggered in a scraping process, some may be inactive, leading to the Achilles heel of email marketing: a bounce (sending an email to an inactive email address). That being said, email campaigns, when done correctly, are a great way to get in front of a large audience in a short amount of time.
Here are some tips and tricks to avoid having your emails hit the spam folder and avoid your domain being blacklisted.
Avoid Bounces Like Your Email Depends On It
A great way to stack the odds in your favor when it comes to emails bouncing is to check your entire email list with an email verification software. Companies such as NeverBounce are a great resource. Yes, having your list scrubbed for invalid emails does cost money but the cost is minimal and worth the health of your domain. At the time this article was created, the pricing for never bounce is detailed below.
By not using an email verification software, you run the risk of sending an email or a whole entire email campaign into invalid emails, which can quickly place your domain on a blacklist or a spam radar for months or even years to come. The only way to get off the blacklists are to dispute the claim or wait months hoping the blacklist takes your domain name off the list.
Check Your Domain On Blacklist Watches Often
The first step to avoiding a problem with your domain and the emails you are sending is to see if there already is a problem. We recommend checking the domain blacklists every week, as a quick spam check to make sure your emails are actually hitting the inboxes you want them to hit instead of being left behind in the dreaded spam folder. Some resources you can use are Ultratools or mxtoolbox to see if your domain is on a registered blacklist and also to check your overall domain health. These resources also have the tools and tricks for disputing your domain being on a blacklist.
Avoid Using Hyperlinks / Web Links
Hyperlinks are literally the death of your domain health when it comes to emails. If you are sending a cold email campaigns and include any link to another website, you will hit spam more likely than not. These email filters are designed to protect people from spam and malicious software. How do these softwares get into your computer? Hyperlinks! Stay away from hyperlinks like they are the plague. Even outside of cold email campaigns, hyperlinks can cause your email to end up in a spam folder of someone who actually wants to see your email.
Minimize Your Signature
The signature feature of an email can be a great asset. They allow you to look professional and provide an area to put your contact information In most cases people provide their email and or domain (website link) on their signature. This causes the same exact problems as putting a hyperlink in the body of your email. Keep your signature simple and avoid web links and hyperlinks because let’s face it, someone is not going to respond to your email because you have a great looking signature, so do not let your signature destroy your domain health and leave your domain left on a blacklist.
Avoid Buzzwords like “FREE”
We want to stay away from spam filters and blacklists. In order to do so, avoid “spammy” words or phrases. Saying “FREE home estimate”, “CASH for your home in under 14 days” or anything which sounds spammy needs to stay out of your emails. The systems which filter for spam see these and flag them as, yep – you guessed it, SPAM. Rule of thumb: if it sounds like spam, if it looks like spam, if it feels like spam, no matter how great your intentions are with your email, it will hit spam.
Avoid Unnecessary Capitalization
This goes with the above. Email filters look for a few specific things to mark as spam. Capitalization is one of them. Think about it this way. In a normal email what is the utility of capitalization? There really is none. This makes having an email with excess capitalization hit spam filters more times than not.
Ramp-Up Volume Of Emails Slowly
If your sending from a newly/recently created email you need to be cautious of the volume you are sending when it comes to emails. If you have a fresh email and suddenly are sending the same exact email to 1,000 emails, you will hit spam and your domain will be at risk of being blacklisted. In order to get up to those numbers it takes time and patience. Start out sending 20 emails a day for a week, then move up to 25 emails a day the following week and add 5 more a day every week until you hit the amount of emails you would like to reach. If you want to ramp up a bit faster, create different email content or create a different domain so you can scale faster and minimize the domain risk.
Keep in mind your total emails sent a day from the same domain will cause your domain to have an increased risk of hitting spam.
Make Your Emails As Personal As Possible
Having emails which are “cookie cutter” emails saying the same thing to everyone receiving the email are not as effective as sending out highly personalized emails. Spam filters recognize the same email is going out to multiple people. When you have Geopoint Data Lead Lists all the information you need to craft a highly personalized email is included. This is where you can be creative and make your emails jump off the screen when compared to your competition. What do you think is more likely to get a response. Having a spammed “We buy houses any condition” email, or a email addressed to a real name, bringing up the actual address they own inside the body of the email along with other relevant, non-invasive details of their situation. I think the answer is clear.
Work Smarter, Not Harder
