Knowledgebase

Avoid these common mistakes

If you're beginning an email campaign or you've been sending email already but know that your emails are going to your recipients' junk folders, we will explains how to improve email deliverability.  In this article, you'll learn how to optimize your email campaign to give it the best chance of making into a user's inbox. This process is called "deliverability" and is the first step to successful email marketing.

HBJamaica has been helping email marketers create and send email campaigns since 2007. During that time, we’ve found that there are a few common mistakes frequently made by email marketers that can result in accidental spam filtering:

• Using phrases like “Click here!” or “Once in a lifetime opportunity!”
  
  
• Only use one exclamation point at a time!  Excessive use of exclamation points!!!!!!!!!  will land you into the spam folder.
  
  
• Don't use ALL CAPS.  USING ALL CAPS, WHICH IS LIKE SCREAMING AT THE TOP OF YOUR LUNGS VIA EMAIL (especially in the subject line).
  
  
• Don't use the word "free" too many times.
  
  
• Don't use lots of colored fonts such as using bright red or green colored fonts.
  
  
• Using bad content. This one’s broad, but important. Email delivery expert Laura Atkins details content-based filtering in this article.
  
  
• Coding sloppy HTML, usually from converting a Microsoft Word file to HTML.  Spam filters check for bad html code, particularly if it looks like the code was done in Microsoft Word and then thrown into an email. Use a professional coder (preferably one who has done email templates before and knows the best way to make them resolve properly in an inbox such as HBJamaica.com) or a template provided within HBJamaica Email Marketing system.
  
  
• Creating an HTML email that’s nothing but one big image, with little or no text is NOT a good idea. Spam filters can’t read images, so they assume you’re a spammer trying to trick them.  If you are not placing TEXT within your newsletter or eblast, we HIGHLY recommend to stop this practice and have a mixture or text and image in order to optimize the delivery results.
  
  
• Creating an HTML email that has large image files.  It is a good practice to keep each image file 100 KB or less or very close to this size while keeping the OVERALL total image size (for all images within the eblast) to be LESS than 400 KB.  The best overall desireable size for success, should be under 300 KB or less.
  
  
• Encourage your subscribers or recipients to add your email to their contact list.  Once a user has added you to his or her contact list, friend list or address book, you will always end up in their inbox. Use every opportunity to encourage those on your email list to add you as a contact. We suggests doing it in the email sign up conformation email, on the confirmation page and during most customer service transactions. A typical way to ask customers to do this is to say, "Ensure that you continue to receive the quality information from us that you enjoy by adding us to your contact list."
  
  
• Using the word “test” in the subject line. Agencies can run into this issue when sending drafts to clients for approval.
  
  
• Sending a test to multiple recipients within the same company. That company’s email firewall often assumes it’s a spam attack.
  
  
• Sending to inactive lists. These are lists which have not engaged in the campaigns through opens and clicks. Because subscriber engagement is a huge part of getting emails into the inbox, when an ISP sees low engagement rates they will often begin to bulk the campaigns to the spam folder. Then they will block the domain and IP addresses used to deliver the campaigns.
  
  
• Sending to stale lists. Permission generally goes stale within about 6 months, so if your subscribers haven’t heard from you within that timeframe, you’ll need to reconfirm your list.

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