SPAM: Believe it or not - your inbox is literally an extension of yourself.
We’re not just talking about your subscription to the Cat Selfie of the Month Club (or something else super-niche) either.
Gmail and other business email platforms are constantly monitoring what you click, and when you click.
After a while, once you build up a history of clicks, these platforms will get a sense of what you like and what you don’t like, and start blocking out anything they think won’t be relevant to you.
Unfortunately, they do not share their ‘algorithm’ - but they do have generalities they follow when they’re identifying incoming emails as SPAM.
We put together the top tools and strategies you can leverage to avoid the dreaded SPAM folder and land in your prospect’s inbox.
- Use an email warmup service such as mailreach.co or warmbox - These services are by far the most important tools when it comes to bypassing the SPAM box. When you install these services - they will immediately add you to their communication network. Then your inbox will automatically start conversing with other email addresses. And if your email lands in SPAM, these warmup services will instantly unspam your email (within the network) to teach ESPs (email service providers) to trust you.
- Ensure that your list is clean - Use a list cleaner such as zerobounce.net, which is affordable and cost-effective. All you have to do is upload a list, and these applications will evaluate whether or not the emails in your list are legit. Or you could use Seamless to automatically buil an accurate list for you in seconds. The goal is to have lists where 99% of the emails are legitimate. These services will also remove ‘honeypot’ emails, which are used to ‘trap’ and identify spammers. If you email a ‘honeypot’ email address - your email will automatically get added to a blacklist.
- Be sure to use a SPAM filter tool - Tools like mailmeteor.com/spam-checker will upgrade your content by ensuring that you’re not using words associated with SPAM.
- Make sure that your email is set up correctly - Run glockapps to make sure everything is in order on your end. Glockapps is a free comprehensive inbox placement tool that will ensure your DMARC and DKIM are set up properly. ESP uses DMARC and DKIM as indicators to check whether to place you in SPAM or not.
- Nail down your subject line - The more opens you have, the better your email reputation will be in the long run. The subject line can make the difference between your email getting seen and opened or winding up in the SPAM folder. To evaluate your subject lines, use a subject line grader like emailsubjectlinegrader.com. This tool will help you write strong, attention-grabbing subject lines that don’t get flagged.
- Find the optimal time to send your email - In order to find out the best times to reach prospects, you may need to pull a report. If you don’t know how to do this, try contacting your email platform and they’ll send you instructions. Once you get your report, find out your best open rate time or when most of your meetings are getting booked. Then hone in on that window of opportunity and start sending your emails at that time.
While you can spend hours obsessing over your content (which, don’t get us wrong, content is critical to get email responses) you still need to make sure you’re actually hitting your prospect’s inbox.
Going into SPAM or getting pushed into another category is not an option because it will destroy your response rate, and in turn, chip away at your business email reputation.
So next time, before you hit send, try out these tools and techniques and maximize your inbox placement.
Say goodbye to the SPAM folder forever!
Related: Legality of Email Scraping
