Email marketing is one of the most solid marketing channels available for marketers. It has been serving millions of companies worldwide to attract new customers as well as extend its support to existing ones. 

It is one of the oldest digital marketing tools there is. However, it has improved significantly in terms of technology and performance over the decades. 

Today, we have several email service providers and engines, such as Constant Contact. They even let us use email marketing as a free tool to a great extent. It’s useful enough to kick start, practice, and measure the response of your initial email marketing efforts.

However, this flexibility and availability mean everyone in the digital space looks to market everything and anything. It is common knowledge that email has been used to commit fraud in various ways. From the good old phishing emails to fake links and product sales, email fraud has become a very common occurrence creating loss and lack of trust across the internet. 

As a result, service providers and authenticators designed and developed several technologies for added security. They implemented standard policies where real businesses and their web domains must authenticate themselves through several layers of email security.

Today it’s very easy for your emails to bounce or not see the light of day despite all the content and marketing efforts you put into them. You might as well seek guidance from a seasoned expert or marketing firm before kickstarting your email marketing campaigns. 

Big marketing firms can be expensive, and their focus might not be as tight as it should be while dealing with small businesses. We recommend you find a firm that positions and focuses on itself as an email marketing agency for small businesses.

Now let us look into the key aspects that determine your email marketing performance. 

Successfully Target The Primary Inbox

Back in the day, the only way to know whether an email touched the primary inbox of the person was to receive a reply from them. However, today, you have several methods to ensure your email reaches the primary inbox of the intended target. 

Firstly you should stay clear of what marketers call spammy language. Seasoned copywriters regularly update themselves with the prevailing rules and use case scenarios to optimize the copy for maximum email delivery performance. 

Earlier, you only had to avoid words such as cash, free, or a bunch of stars and emojis. However, today the list of spam word lists has become a really long one. Even words such as “amazing” and “marvelous” can trigger the spam police to push your email straight into the spam folder. 

Stay Off The Spam Folder

Out of all, Google’s spambots are the most strict and hard to pass through. It’s very easy for even legit emails to fall into the spam category because there is more than one image in the respective email. 

Despite being an authentic business or website, there are many reasons why the spam police could push your emails into the spam box. For instance, if a Gmail user enables an option called ‘Blatant blocking’, Gmail will ensure 100% that your email will never reach that person’s inbox.

In another scenario, if your email was being sent in bulk, the bulk email filter might filter the emails as it enters the email server space.

These are just starters, followed by a myriad of reasons your email marketing could flop or take significant hits despite the costs and time invested.

So let’s look at ways to help your marketing emails clear through these tough security layers to boost your ROI.

• To begin with, request your target audience to include your email id as an approved sender. This will ensure that they don’t miss or filter any of your future emails into their spam or promotions tab. You can include an add us to your address book button to do this. 
• Also, verify that the IP address you’re using is free from problems such as a spammy history. Spam blocking Smartware will detect and delete your emails if you launch your campaign with a previously flagged IP for spamming.
• This is where companies such as Constant Contact are of huge help. They have pre-authenticated systems and provide options to wash and verify your business domain to make sure your email campaign performs at optimum levels. 
• Be sure you maintain your open and reply rates up to a healthy level. Good copywriting strategies can help you to achieve this to a great extent. You must also give special attention to the design of your email as well as its header and subject line. People actually consider and get influenced by them.
• Poor open rates can again affect your campaign performance as they can change spam filter behavior. Search engine spambots can easily conclude your emails to be unworthy of being passed through due to the high unopened email rates. So ensure that you test your emails before launching your campaign. Constant Contact provides an A/B testing facility right on their dashboard. They also can help you design attractive email templates that are far less likely to be flagged.

Conclusion

That sums up how to stay clear of the spam police to enhance your email marketing campaign performance. Furthermore, to ensure optimum open and reply rates, you must correct your deliverability issues. To do so, you must create an email list, segment it, use an optimum amount of images, authenticate your emails and track your campaign results.