Email Marketing Tips

Ten top tips for getting your emails past spam filters

Want to do some email marketing but not sure where to start? Follow the tips below to help make sure your email campaigns get through the spam filters and generate positive results.

• Get permission
  To ensure compliance with Data Protection legislation make sure your email marketing is permission-based which means you need the customer’s consent to contact them. To build up your contacts database, collect email addresses from your customers at every opportunity!

• Plan your campaign
  What do you want to get out of your email campaign? If you want to increase sales, think about how to achieve this. Will you make special offers designed to appeal to specific groups of customers? Do you want to invite customers to an exclusive shopping evening?

• Call to action
  Include a call to action in every email you send. For example you could invite customers to download discount vouchers, purchase a discounted product online, or agree to attend an event.

• Links
  Make sure you have links to your website so customers can find out more about individual offers. By monitoring customer click-throughs you will be able to measure your campaign’s success.

• Subject line
  The subject line has a major influence on whether recipients open and read emails. Keep it short and avoid using CAPS, exclamation marks or words like ‘free’.

• Design
  Make sure your design works! An HTML design will make your email look more professional, but if you don’t get it right, it will fail to render correctly across all inboxes or will get caught in spam filters. If in doubt, try using the free templates provided by email marketing solutions such as dotMailer.

• Targeting
  Targeting will ensure your email marketing sends the right content to the right people at the right time. By tailoring email content to different customer groups, you will significantly increase your chances of success.

• Experiment
  Find out what works. Consider doing some split testing, by sending slight variations on your email to different customer groups. For example, find out what happens if you change the sender’s name from male to female, or use a different subject header, or send the same email at different times.

• Deliverability
  Believe it or not, the main obstacle you will face is getting your email into your customers’ inbox! ISPs delete billions of emails each day. Make sure you choose an Email Service Provider with good deliverability rates. Click here to find out more.

• Measurement
  Measurement is the key to future success. By finding out how many emails were delivered and opened, and which links customers clicked on within the email, you can fine-tune your next campaign.