In the pursuit of getting more business and creating better contacts, emails are the most professional and successful tools. However, are you aware of the fact that emails, particularly sales or promotional emails, get filtered as spam by many email service providers?
This means many of your outreach emails have not even been looked upon by your recipients. According to Return Path’s 2018 Deliverability Benchmark report, 6 percent of sales and marketing emails globally are blocked as spam, and 10 percent never reach the recipient’s inbox.
Understanding the reason your sales emails are getting marked as spam will allow you to find solutions so those emails make it to the inbox and your sales and marketing campaigns do no suffer.
8 Reasons Sales Emails End Up in Spam (And How to Avoid It!)
Here we are sharing the top 8 reasons why your sales emails get filtered as spam, along with pro tips on how you may possibly avoid that fate.
1. Mass-Emailing Your Contact List
Levi Olmstead, Content and Community Manager at G2 Crowd, shared that when companies send out bulk emails, certain email triggers get set off. Amongst the bulk list may be contacts that companies have never emailed or communicated with before. Sending bulk emails from the same email domain also kicks off a negative impact on your email campaigns. A better strategy is to manage your contacts properly by creating various segments and sending smaller batches of emails out to specific segments of customers.
Pro Tip
Arrange to send your bulk emails in a periodic drip. This will allow you to set up your email campaign to automatically push out a handful of emails every 15 minutes (or the timing you think is suitable) instead of sending them all out at once.
2. Low Open Rates from the Past
Email service providers including Gmail and Yahoo track your past user engagement. This helps them determine whether your messages are apt to be allowed into a user’s inbox or should go to spam. If your sales emails are not getting the level of engagement that these service providers hold as parameters, then their algorithm will mark your emails as spam.
Pro Tip
Do what you can to increase engagement with your emails. As Paulson advises: “Use intriguing subject lines like ‘strange question?’ and ‘bad news?’ to compel people to open your messages to see what’s inside. Also, use clear calls to action in your messages like ‘Reply to this email and let me know if you are interested’ or a link that says ‘Click here to learn more’ that encourage people to engage.”
3. Too Many Images
Having your company logo, or the visually appealing product image inside emails, is a norm in sales communications. However, being a business, you must also carefully decide on the number of images to be included in your emails.
If you are sending out image-heavy emails, then your emails are definitely going to be marked as spam by the service providers.
“Using ALT text isn’t just a best practice to avoid dreaded spam placement—it’s also an important consideration for accessibility,” says Caroline Gormley, Senior Marketing Specialist at Gartner Digital Markets.
Pro Tip
You should format your images with ALT text and keep a good 50/50 or 60/40 text-to-image ratio.
4. Non-Tested Email Formatting
Your team gets a new email ready to be pushed out to the recipients. It looks great on the initial viewing. Knowing how it will look in other various screens, devices, and in other email programs will help your email campaigns. If email service providers are not able to “view” or “read” your emails, they will end up in spam.
Pro Tip
Digital Marketing Lecturer of Griffith College, Danny O’Brien, recommends designing an email and testing it on your email plus a few others (Gmail, Outlook, etc.) and alter design based on your findings.
5. Sender Reputation
Sender reputation is a score that Internet Service Provider (ISP) assigns to a domain that sends an email. The higher your score, the more likely the ISP will deliver your emails to the recipients’ inboxes.
As a business, you must keep an eye on your email list and also on the email deliverability. Your recipients’ interaction with your emails affects your sender reputation.
Pro Tip
Remove email addresses that are undeliverable and observe the email addresses that are engaging with your email content. Inactive users will always drag your sender rank down.
Lori Beth Blair, an Email Deliverability Consultant at Platonic Ideal, explains that addresses with @gnail.com or @gamil.com are suppressed as well as temporary inboxes like @mailinator.com. Validate email addresses before they are entered into your CRM or database management system so that they meet the proper formatting requirements.
6. Poor Email List
If you have been noticing one or two non-responding users out of your list of 100, then do not panic or get demoralized. That is not going to end your business. Scrub your email list for unresponsive contacts. The emails that you collect for your businesses’ fodder and growth won’t stay the same forever.
Many users stop accessing their emails after a certain time period, that’s why KLEAN13 CEO, Marc Goldman, recommends scrubbing lists. Major email service providers say that over the course of a year, 25 percent of the contacts in the mailing list go blank.
Pro Tip
Keep your email contact lists clean! Do this once a month. Unsubscribe any contact who hasn’t opened an email you sent out in the last 12 months.
7. Use of Spam-Trigger Words
Your choice of words in the email content can get your emails marked as spam. Even when you have a really good offer for your prospects, be careful about the wording in your email.
Sales trainer and marketing expert Scott Channell warns that promising something cheap, absolutely free, or with instant access will get your email tagged as spam
Pro Tip
Keep your email message body clean of such words and stay original in your email content. You can refer to various online resources that list out trigger words, so use them and avoid getting your emails marked as spam.
8. No Option to Unsubscribe
Sending emails to people who have not already opted or subscribed to your email newsletters is bad for your sender reputation. As a business, you are already smitten by the fact that your email lists are full and can be reused to pool in new customers when the shopping season arrives.
Do not make it difficult for your email subscribers to leave your email list. It is always a bad idea if you don’t allow customers or prospects to unsubscribe from your mailing list.
A seller must only send emails to recipients who mutually agree to receive communication-related to flash sales, offers or discounts. Always provide them with the option to unsubscribe from that list at any given time.
Pro Tip
Honor the unsubscribe requests in a timely and professional manner. Provide the option to unsubscribe, and get it done quickly.
We hope that this article has been able to guide you enough so you can avoid seeing your sales emails land in the spam box. Emails are an important part of your business communication. Although it is sometimes easy to get contacts on your email list, and it is even easier to push people away from over communication.
