5 Steps to Make Sure Emails Stay Out of the Dreaded Spam Folder – Part 2
In part 1 of this article, I gave you the first three steps for staying out of the spam folder. Here are another two.
Step 4: Avoid Image-Only Emails
We’ve lost track of how many times we’ve seen spam emails that consist only of images. Why? Because spammers often use images to hide text because email providers can’t “read” images. Image-only emails are automatically more suspicious than emails with a good balance of text and images.
We get it. It might be tempting to avoid HTML hassles by creating a beautiful graphic of your email content and sending it to your list, but you shouldn’t do it. Not only are image-only emails more likely to be flagged as spam, they’re also often not readable. Some email providers automatically block images.
You should also keep in mind that image-only emails are not as user-friendly as text-based emails. People who are visually impaired often rely on text readers to read an email. These readers are incapable of reading images and that means that you’re potentially rendering your emails useless to anybody who uses a reader to access them.
Step 5: Use a Legitimate “From” Email Address
If you get a lot of emails, then we’re willing to bet that you also see a lot of email address that follows this format:
You might think that you’re saving some time and aggravation by making it impossible for people to reply to your emails. However, there’s a catch.
A lot of the time, people don’t notice the “no reply” part of the email and they will try to respond anyway. That means you’re potentially missing out on a chance to engage with your subscribers – but that’s only part of the problem.
The bigger issue is that one of the things that email providers look at when deciding whether an email is a spam is the sender’s email address. Not every “no-reply” address will get flagged as spam, but many will. That means your emails may not make it to your subscribers’ inboxes at all.
Another benefit of eliminating “no-reply” email addresses is that subscribers often can’t add them to their address book or safe senders list. When we subscribe to email lists, we always like to add the sender to our address books as a way of ensuring that their emails make it to our inboxes.
So, an easy fix is to simply create a valid email address, and avoid support@, help@, customerservice@ emails. Instead, use someone’s real name email and use that to send your bulk emails. Yes, you may need to filter through some responses if it’s your email address– but at least you’ll know that subscribers are receiving your messages.
