If you send emails that get eaten by the spam monster – you’ve wasted your time. These 9 tips can help you make sure your prospects get your emails.
1. Don’t put links in your emails.
If you want to have the best chance of not being filtered out of your prospects inbox, don’t put any links.
Spammers use links, and lots of links. If you have ZERO links in an email – your chances of hitting the inbox will increase.
My friend Dee Martin has been testing this and seeing great results. He’ll send out plain text emails and instead of putting in a link, he’ll give a call to action for his email subscriber to respond to the email instead. He’s seeing multiple responses daily.
2. If you must use links, limit the number.
I was looking at some emails I sent our recently and noticed that one of them had gone to the ‘promotions’ folder and the others made it to the inbox.
What was the difference?
The one that went to promotions folder had 3 emails and the ones that made it to the inbox, had 2 or less.
3. Avoid the world ‘financial freedom’ in your emails
For some reason – spam blockers HATE the words ‘financial freedom’. Make sure to swap that term out with the more simple and email approved ‘Freedom’. It means pretty much the same thing when read in context and won’t get your emails blocked.
4. Encourage your subscribers to reply to your emails from time to time.
As my good buddy Mike always says, normal people send emails to other normal people – and those normal people reply to each other’s emails.
Think of your email account as having a constant grading system. Opens, clicks and replies can improve your grade over time so your email service will want to deliver more of your emails.
5. Send your emails in plain text or at least include a plain text version.
Plain text is just an email without any fancy formatting, images or embedded links.
Plain text emails are definitely not as cool looking – but they have a higher chance of passing all the internet filters.
This doesn’t mean formatted emails are bad, but it does mean that there are people out there who won’t get your email if you only have an HTML version.
Some email services will allow you to create an HTML version AND a plain text version and it will send the appropriate one to your subscribers.
I have an older GetResponse account which means I can actually write 2 versions of my emails (1 HTML, the other plain text) and it will send the right version automatically.
I learned yesterday that the new get response accounts will automatically create a plain text version for you HOWEVER – you still need to be aware of how you write the email for the plain text version to make sense to your readers.
Plain text does not allow you to wrap links into words like ‘click here to sign up for a free trial of Get Response.‘
If you write like that – your plain text email will not make sense.
Instead, write it like this…
Click here to sign up for a Free trial of Get Response…
6. Keep your list clean
Having subscribers on your list that never open, read or click on any links you send out does not help your cause.
It’s important to keep your email engagement scores high – so you’ll be viewed as a quality sender.
Every once in a while – do a purge of all the non-engaged subscribers.
You can delete them from your list all together, or maybe download them to a spreadsheet that you can email from another service less often to see if you can get them re-engaged.
If you’d prefer this happen automatically, GetResponse has automations you can set up so this all happens behind the scenes.
7. Add a DKIM record to your domain.
Yesterday as I was checking my spam score on some auto responder emails, I noticed that because I had a DKIM record installed – my score was less than zero – zero being not spam at all.
Apparently – having a DKIM record gives you BIG brownie points with the email Gods.
DKIM stands for DomainKeys Identified Mail – and it’s simply a way to make sure that the email was sent – and received without being altered in transit – which makes the email much more legitimate.
If you can imagine you and your friend, each having a secret password that only you 2 know and you use that password to unlock messages sent back and forth between each other to make sure you’re communicating with your friend and not someone else – that’s exactly what DKIM does.
Having this set up and working on your behalf will help with deliverability.
8. Don’t sent mass emails from free email accounts like Gmail or Yahoo.
Make sure you are sending emails from an email associated with a domain you own.
[email protected] – > BAD
[email protected] – > GOOD
If you need a domain with emails – you can pick up 100 free email addresses with a new domain by purchasing your domain here. (It’s less cost than Godaddy too)
9. Check your spam score BEFORE sending any emails.
Most email & autoresponder services have a way to check your email to see if you have anything in it that could be identified as spam.
In many cases it’s pushing a simple button and getting back realtime tips on what you need to change to make sure your email is safe to send.
Make sure you use this and edit your emails before pushing that send button.
Ok my friend, that’s it. Really hope these 9 tips can help you big time with your email marketing and so you can sponsor, sell and grow your freedom even faster.