Email marketing is certainly golden. We all hopefully know it by now. No matter how many smart online marketing strategies arise, email marketing is still one of the top shots that is golden.
There are various reasons to it. In my opinion one of the most important reasons is that we get to go far more personal and have the opportunity to market directly to one person by landing right into his/her inbox.
This is actually a great thing. It is not easy to get that privilege.
But as an email marketer it is very important to have this in mind:
The very fact that you’ve got someone’s email address doesn’t mean that he/she is yours for life.
There’s this nasty little “unsubscribe” button which people usually click much faster than they clicked your “subscribe” button.
And that’s not all - even if your subscriber has not clicked the “unsubscribe” button yet, there’s something called “Spam”. You hate spam, right? I hate spam and so do everyone.
And that is why email service providers have special systems to sideline emails that are spam or “sound” spam and deliver them in the spam folder instead of the inbox.
This means, not every person is going to even see your email even though you have managed to deliver ALL of your emails (100% deliverability). Most people usually flush delete all emails in spam folder without even glancing them. And there goes all your hard work and money - flushed!
Spam is a serious word these days - given the number of spam marketing strategies adopted by the so called guru marketers. And email autoresponder solutions (like Aweber, Getresponse etc.) are taking spam so seriously to that point where if someone is found sending a lot of spam mails to his/her subscribers using their system, they even delete the accounts!
So it is highly important that you avoid your precious emails from landing in the spam folders of your subscribers, by all means, at least for two reasons:
1. You don’t want your hard work and your money making/marketing email to go unseen and get flushed.
2. You don’t want to be marked as a spammer and eventually be banned from the popular email autoresponder service providers.
Let’s dive in to see how we can avoid this.
Do you have their permission?
Permission email marketing is a crucial factor and its importance is increasing fastly these days. It is very important that you first have someone’s permission before sending an email to them.
You don’t go to someone’s house, uninvited. Even if you do so, you won’t get a warm welcome if that person doesn’t know you beforehand, of course.
So how do you get someone’s permission before you can add them to your list and send them your emails? Simple - do not use purchased email lists. If you purchase a list of someone else, there are two concerns -
(i) they did not sign up for your list; so you’re an unwelcomed guest in their inbox,
(ii) they did not sign up for your newsletter; so they might not be interested in the emails they send.
If you don’t purchase lists but only collect emails in your site using an optin form, that’s great. But still you can go one step further and turn on double optin so that you are 100% sure that you have their permission to email them. Simple, right?
Analyze your email for spam
Most popular email autoresponder services like Aweber and Getresponse have an inbuilt spam analyzer that shows how “spammy” are your messages. Use these tools and aim for a spam score of zero or at least stay in the safe limit!
Do not use trigger words in headline
Usually most email service providers are triggered by the spammy words in the email subject or within the body (according to their usage) to categorize an email as spam. If you use those trigger words, sure your email is going to be labeled as spam!
Here are some of the examples, but the spam topics are not just limited to this.
Get white listed
Oh this one is also so important, especially given that you’re sending out emails to thousands or hundreds of accounts at one instant.
You have to encourage your list subscribers to add your email address to their address book. This will immediately eliminate the risk of your email landing in the spam folder right off the bat, for a certain level (that is, if your email itself is not tooo spammy!).
You can do this by adding a small sentence in the pre-header, as shown below:
Get hold of the right email frequency
Too much is always annoying. Too less will make your readers forget you. So pick the right email frequency that works for you.
Of course, it can only be found by trial and error, but you should go for a much un-annoying frequency to start with - say once a week.
And then tweak it, if necessary, to find out the right frequency that suits your subscribers. Mostly, the once-a-week schedule should work just fine.
Takeaway
You should, by all means, avoid landing in the spam folder of your subscribers. It is not only a waste of your time and money, but also hurts your reputation.
I hope these tips will help you to land in the inbox of your subscribers! Let me know if you have additional tips. Kindly open up in the comments 
Hi Jane! This is a really important topic.Email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to sell products and services online, after we have built up a good relationship with the readers.As you mentioned, thanks to the spam problem also valid emails will be deleted.
I have noticed that the email subject line should be in question form, like “Name, What do you think about this idea?” This makes the reader curious and wants to open and read it.The subject line does not have any spam triggers in it and should end up in the inbox instead of the spam folder.
When it comes to the email message, it should be short and sweet, and refer the reader back to your website for more information.
I am surprised sometimes when I check my spam folder in gmail (which I rarely check) and I see some of my wanted email in there. Usually ezines or stuff like that. I wonder if the senders know they are landing in gmail spam folder instead of inbox. Makes me realize how important it is to avoid landing in the spam folder. The built in spam analyzers are really so useful. Glad you mentioned them!
It’s very difficult to stay out of the folder even if you are very careful about what you send. Some of the main email services like Yahoo seem to block everything and even when you send messages to their team they still don’t remove blocks. It’s ridiculous but it’s the way it is now. About the best you can do is use some of the filters out there and hope for the best.
Well said, while it is important that we utilize email marketing as a part of our SEO campaign, we must take care to avoid making some of the most common mistakes of this format. Surely I will implement above tips to getting best results from email marketing efforts.
Must know things, really all these could help to avoid spams in the email. These days, spams are more frequently sent and proper care must be taken.
There are many good reasons for maintaining a steady flow of communication, rather than relying on infrequent, massive “blasts.”
Everyone want to make money from internet but it is not easy as it seems, you have to do hard work here to making good money on internet. This all are the really nice sources to start your own online work and start making money online.
Ha Ha..Yes it’s like you are forcing to people that come to us and we will give more value than others to you. Email Marketing is the best way to make money online and for business sales but nowdays everyone is making crap, garbage marketing by adding a lot of stuff. I’ve done email marketing but now I got all the knowledge in detail after reading this post.
Hello Jane I came to your site from Google when I searched on this topic. Actually we are doing email marketing since last couple of months for our classified ad portal and just got some interests about how to make it more productive. You have written this posting with all helpful suggestions now is the time we go and change some of the things in our email marketing strategy. We were a bit confused about the frequency of our emails and we generally send one email daily to our subscribers. Do you think this is all right or should we increase or decrease our frequency?
Tamera Hyde says
The Lesson: pay attention to deliverability, inbox deliverability, and messages delivered to the spam folders and test various elements to try to isolate the problem.
Hi Jane,
I have a list of 500 subscribers where I send them emails once a week, however the open percentage of the emails are very less..How frequently should I send emails to my subscribers? Also I am just promoting my product in the emails, is that okay?
Your post is simply spectacular and I can assume you are an expert on this field. Thanks a million and please keep up the fabulous work. Thanks a lot once again.