8 Tips For Avoiding Email Spam Filters

You’ve crafted compelling copy and thoughtfully designed your email marketing campaign, so it’s tempting to think you’ve covered all your bases. But email marketing requires more than just the right messaging to be effective — to be read, your emails have to make it into your recipients’ inboxes in the first place. Consider these eight email marketing tips before you send your next campaign.

1. Craft a quality subject line

No matter how great your email copy is, the best email in the world will go unread if no one clicks on it. 47 percent of people open an email based entirely on the subject line, so take your time crafting the right subject line for your audience. Here are a few key things to keep in mind when writing your subject line:

• Avoid using spam words in subject lines (here’s a list of 455 spam trigger words to avoid)
• Don’t use exclamation points, ALL CAPS or the $ sign
• Use numbers and statistics, such as “10 proven tactics to upsell” or “5 ways to improve your customer retention”
• Personalize your email by using recipients’ first names or company names; personalized subject lines lift open rates by as much as 29 percent
• Keep your subject lines short and sweet (but not too short); read rates tend to be the highest for 10-16 word subject lines
• Use action verbs, such as “Get,” “Save” or “Join”
• Beware of emojis: some customers love them, some customers hate them. If you aren’t planning to do extensive email testing and performance monitoring, it’s best to skip them altogether.

2. Write compelling, spam-proof email copy

Nailing your messaging is only the beginning of effective email marketing campaigns. You have to nail your email copy too, and avoid using language that can get your email sent to spam. Here are some great tips for writing effective marketing emails. A few highlights: An effective email is attention-grabbing, personalized, offers a benefit to the reader and can be digested in 15-20 seconds. Focus on benefits to your customers, not the features of your product (a good measure of success is using “you” rather than “we”). And include plenty of calls to action, such as a link to your online booking site, webstore or gift card sales page.

3. Use images, but not too many

Last year, a whopping 25 percent more marketing emails used images. But that doesn’t mean you should load your emails up with multiple images or send emails that are nothing but a single large image. Images should be used strategically for maximum impact. Keep these email marketing tips in mind:

• Don’t use too many images in a single email or it may end up in spam folders; stick to a 70 percent text, 30 percent images ratio for best performance
• Be careful not to copy and paste images, which can add extra code and impact how your email displays
• Compress your images to keep file sizes small in order to optimize load times
• Use alt-text for images for accessibility purposes

4. Pay attention to the quality of your lists

Increasingly sophisticated spam filters make it more important than ever to maintain high-quality email lists. Email validation tools identify junk/spam/invalid email addresses. Zenoti validates email addresses as they’re added to guest profiles to ensure emails are only sent to valid email addresses. But it’s still important to review email status reports periodically in Zenoti to find emails that failed and troubleshoot them. Many email send failures are due to a lack of email addresses saved to customer profiles. To ensure your front desk is capturing customer email addresses, you can require email addresses be added before a customer profile can be saved. If you need help implementing this feature, send a message to Customer Support through the blue bubble.

5. Use email warming to improve delivery rates

If you have an email blast to send to 10,000 customers, you should go ahead and send it to everyone … right? Wrong. When you suddenly begin sending a large volume of emails, it triggers internet service providers (ISPs) to view you with caution. This can negatively impact your email delivery rates. A better way to send email blasts is using IP warming. IP warming is the practice of gradually increasing the volume of email sent from an IP address on a predetermined schedule. This trains ISPs to trust your emails, and improves the odds of your emails making it into your recipients’ inboxes. Zenoti uses an email service provider that handles IP warming automatically so you don’t have to worry about the details.

6. Personalize your offers, not just your copy

Before you hit send, consider who your target customers really are: Will your offer appeal to all of your customers or should you target specific customer segments? When your marketing emails are targeted to the right customers, they tend to perform better, which can improve your email delivery rates over time. One report found that 39 percent of email marketers who segmented their email lists saw improved open rates, and 24 percent had improved email delivery rates as a result. Here’s how to create a custom target segment in Zenoti.

7. Monitor the performance of your email campaigns

Spam filters are smarter than they used to be. They don’t stop at “spammy” words — they use advanced metrics such as open rates and click-through rates to determine your trustworthiness. When these rates are low, your emails are more likely to be sent to spam. Stay on top of your email performance data and make adjustments based on engagement, open rates and unsubscribes. Consider segmenting your email lists to better target your offers to your customers.

8. Comply with email laws

The CAN-SPAM Act, a law that sets the rules for commercial email, establishes requirements for commercial messages, gives recipients the right to have you stop emailing them and spells out tough penalties for violations. Key email marketing tips to keep in mind:

• Include physical address at the bottom of the email
• Provide an option for recipients to unsubscribe

Resources

Here are some additional resources that can offer more email marketing tips for your next campaign:

• 10 Tips to Keep Email Out of the Spam Folder
• How to Avoid the Spam Folder in 10 Easy Steps
• The 9 Must-Have Components of Compelling Email Copy
• Top 10 Bulk Email Verification and Validation Services Compared

Did you know you can send robust email marketing campaigns to your customers directly from Zenoti? Visit our support center to learn how to get started with email marketing in Zenoti.