How can I improve my email open rates and avoid spam filters?
Summary
What email marketers say15Marketer opinions
Email marketer from Litmus shares that ensuring your email design is responsive and renders correctly across different devices and email clients is crucial for a positive user experience, which can indirectly improve open rates by fostering trust and engagement.
Email marketer from Mailchimp explains that improving open rates involves several strategies including segmenting your audience to send more relevant content, optimizing subject lines to be clear and engaging, cleaning your email list to remove inactive subscribers, and testing different email elements to see what resonates best with your audience.
Marketer from Email Geeks shares that you increase open rates if you send something relevant to folks which they want or expect, otherwise you will increase spam votes.
Email marketer from ZeroBounce responds that regularly cleaning your email list by removing invalid, inactive, or spam trap addresses is essential for maintaining a good sender reputation and improving deliverability. They also suggest using an email validation service to identify and remove these problem addresses.
Email marketer from Reddit shares that a key to improving open rates is A/B testing different subject lines and preheader text. Also, make sure you're sending at the right time for your audience, and personalize your emails as much as possible.
Marketer from Email Geeks explains that high sending frequencies are generally only acceptable when you have something new to promote in each message and where recipients are interested in receiving that amount of email. Suggests trying 2 or 3 times a week and excluding recipients from campaigns if they haven't opened or clicked in several months.
Email marketer from Campaign Monitor responds that segmenting your email list based on demographics, behavior, or purchase history allows you to send more targeted and relevant messages, which can increase open rates and reduce the likelihood of being marked as spam.
Email marketer from Sendinblue shares that personalizing email content beyond just using the recipient's name can significantly improve engagement and open rates. This includes tailoring content to match their interests, past purchases, or browsing behavior.
Email marketer from OptinMonster explains that using double opt-in, where subscribers confirm their email address before being added to your list, ensures that you are only sending emails to people who genuinely want to receive them, which improves engagement and reduces the risk of spam complaints.
Marketer from Email Geeks shares that typically with a low open rate it means you are landing in spam and the first step in increasing those open rate is not landing in spam, use seed services and delivery products to see where your emails are landing
Marketer from Email Geeks responds that email frequency depends on how you have set your subscriber expectations, highlighting the importance of making it clear before they signed up that they would be getting daily+ emails.
Email marketer from Email on Acid shares that testing your emails before sending them to your entire list can help you identify and fix rendering issues, broken links, and other problems that can negatively impact engagement and deliverability.
Email marketer from HubSpot responds that improving email deliverability involves carefully managing your sender reputation, segmenting your email lists for targeted messaging, monitoring bounce rates and unsubscribe rates, regularly cleaning your email list, and complying with CAN-SPAM and GDPR regulations.
Email marketer from Email Marketing Forum explains that using URL shorteners can sometimes trigger spam filters, so it's best to use full, branded URLs. Also, avoid using excessive exclamation points or all caps in your subject lines.
Email marketer from Neil Patel shares that to avoid spam filters, focus on building a clean email list through double opt-in, use a reputable email service provider, authenticate your emails with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, avoid using spam trigger words in your subject lines and body, and ensure your emails have a clear unsubscribe link.
What the experts say4Expert opinions
Expert from Email Geeks shares that the more email you send, the lower it seems like your open rate would be, unless you’re counting unique against all sends collectively. If you’re only focused on your own goal and not the recipient’s, then the only difference between you and a spammer is the fact that your recipients have given you permission to email them.
Expert from Spam Resource explains that one key to avoiding spam filters is to avoid spam traps, which are email addresses used to identify spammers. They recommend using double opt-in to ensure subscribers genuinely want to receive your emails and regularly cleaning your email list to remove inactive or invalid addresses.
Expert from Word to the Wise explains that your sending IP's reputation is key to hitting the inbox. They suggest using dedicated IPs, rather than shared IPs, and monitoring your reputation to avoid being blocked by anti-spam systems.
Expert from Word to the Wise, Laura Atkins, shares that engagement is key to good deliverability. Getting recipients to interact with your emails helps you land in the inbox. She suggests cleaning your lists, sending interesting and engaging content, and removing unengaged recipients from your mailings.
What the documentation says4Technical articles
Documentation from RFC Editor explains that emails must adhere to RFC 5322 for proper formatting. This includes correctly formatted headers, message bodies, and character encoding to ensure compatibility and avoid being flagged as spam.
Documentation from Google Support explains that to ensure your emails reach Gmail inboxes, you must authenticate your email with SPF and DKIM, keep spam rates below 0.10% and avoid ever reaching 0.30%, use a consistent sending IP address, format messages according to Internet RFC standards, and subscribe to the Gmail Postmaster Tools to monitor your sending reputation.
Documentation from DMARC.org explains that DMARC builds upon SPF and DKIM to provide a policy for handling emails that fail authentication checks. Implementing DMARC allows domain owners to instruct recipient mail servers on how to handle unauthenticated emails (e.g., reject, quarantine) and provides reporting on authentication failures.
Documentation from Microsoft Learn explains that SPF is an email authentication method used to prevent spammers from sending messages on behalf of your domain. SPF records are added to your DNS to authorize specific mail servers to send email using your domain.