You’ve got to gain every edge available as an affiliate by using email marketing to reach your audience. But low email delivery rates caused by spam filters or a blacklisted IP address may cannibalize these efforts. Thankfully, there are a few ways to improve your email deliverability.
Avoiding the Spam Filter
Having your email marketing newsletter land in the recipient’s spam folder is an affiliate nightmare. You can immediately increase your email delivery rate by learning how to avoid this major pitfall.
Here are some brief and effective tips for improving your email marketing delivery and staying out of the spam folder:
- Test for spam before you send. There are free online email spam test programs that will alert you to potential red-flags in your email. It is advisable to test the HTML source code of the email rather than the plain text as sometimes excessive use of formatting can trigger the spam flag.
- Use a double opt-in email strategy. This means when a visitor subscribes to your email newsletter, they will have to click a link in an email to confirm their subscription. Cut down drastically on spam-report rates by making sure your email list includes only addresses who have confirmed their interest in your deliveries.
- Make it easy to unsubscribe and contact you. Quality email services are prejudiced against emails that do not include a link to unsubscribe. This is seen as a sign of spam and often is enough to stop your emails from being delivered to the inbox.
- Avoid the BCC feature. Some email marketers opt to email their newsletter to themselves and “blind carbon-copy” it to everyone in their list. Emails with huge BCC lists trip spam filters in many email services. This practice should be avoided.
- Maintain same “sender” name and address. Your readers will grow accustomed to seeing you as a sender in their inbox. If you decide to change this title, they may not realize it’s you and report your email as spam. Provide consistency in your email marketing as much as possible.
Taking basic steps to stay out of the spam filter will help improve email delivery rates, but the work is not yet done.
Tricks to Increase Email Deliveries
Here are a few more strategies to help boost your email marketing delivery and create more conversions:
- Host your newsletter online. Many email marketers use images as a key piece of content in their newsletters. However, some of your recipients may have HTML disabled for incoming emails. Your newsletter probably doesn’t look nearly as good when you take away all of the images. Remedy this by hosting the full newsletter online and providing a link at the top of the email to access the online version. Think: “Having trouble viewing this email? Click here to load it in a web browser.”
- Ask subscribers to add your address to their contact list. This can be accomplished at the beginning of your email in a smaller font so as not to detract from the main content. It ensures that readers see the images in your newsletter since many email services will not load images in emails sent from unfamiliar senders.
Ensure You’re Not Blacklisted
Finally, you need to ensure your domain’s IP address isn’t on any spam blacklists. This is easy to do.
First, open command prompt (keyboard shortcut: windows + r, type “cmd”, hit enter) and enter “ping www.yourdomain.com“. You will see an IP address bracketed in the response. Next, search for that IP address on a spam blacklist checker.
If your IP address appears on a blacklist, contact your ISP and ask for a new IP address. This single step can improve your email delivery rates substantially.