How to Avoid Getting Into Spam
B2B email marketing is the name of the game when it comes to B2B lead generation. However, all the hard work that goes into researching, writing, and sending those emails amounts to nothing if it gets labeled as spam. Even worse, once the address you sent those emails from gets flagged, the odds of your emails failing to reach new recipients increase substantially. Let’s get down to business straight away and look at the top 5 things you should know to avoid getting into spam.
Using a Free Mail Service Provider
Free email providers like Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail are first and foremost designed for personal communication. They aren’t meant to be used for mass email campaigns. If you’re sending out a limited amount of emails every week, you might just get a pass. Each service has specific mailing service rules regarding the frequencies and contents of such emails. So, if you insist on using these, study the specifics for your provider. Otherwise, spend some money on a corporate domain. Don’t be cheap. Your competitors won’t be.
Fun Fact #1 – The Nigerian Prince scam is still going strong, costing Americans at least $700,000 in 2019.
Irrelevant Emails
Let’s imagine you convince someone to sign up for a weekly newsletter summarizing the events in the industry they are working in. But what you start doing is sending them a bunch of irrelevant crap that other companies ask or even pay you to do. This includes promotions, company services, sales letters from your partners, etc. The fact that you’re doing this frequently doesn’t help.
As a result, statistics show that your emails have abnormally low opening rates, and high levels of unsubscriptions, and are manually categorized as spam. All this negative user feedback is a direct signal for mail services to label everything you send as spam. Understand your target audience, moderate your outreach frequency, and people will be reading what you have to say.
Sending Emails Without Warming up the Address
This is one of the biggest rookie mistakes you can make in the world of email marketing. You just spent some hard-earned money on setting up your new corporate domain, and you’re eager to start doing business. So you decide there’s no time to waste, import your base of 50,000 recipients, and start with the outreach.
Within the day your address will be labeled as toxic (toxic domains are synonymous with bot-created, spam, and abuse emails) and obviously – spam. To avoid this, a newly formed address needs to be warmed up. There are a lot of nuances that go into warming up a domain, but to play safe, the algorithm looks something like this:
- Create your first letter and send it to less than 10 recipients;
- The next day, send the same letter to a slightly larger base of new recipients, like 20;
- Continue to send those emails every day for the next week, increasing their number by 20-40%;
- After 1 week, compose a second email and start on the number of recipients you ended the first week with and continue with the +20-40% daily additions;
- Repeat this algorithm until you can send the letter to your entire database at once. That is when your domain can be considered warmed up.
Avoid URL/Link Shortening
This is a quick point to make, but this alone can bring your entire outreach campaign to a halt. Spam filters pay special attention to link shortening. The consensus is that shortened links predominantly lead to malicious sites, and for this fact alone they are considered to be a red flag. A few examples of link shorteners are Bit.ly and tinyurl.com.
Fun Fact #2 – The US is home to 7/10 of the world’s top scam companies.
Validate Your Email Base
If you’re sending out thousands of emails consistently, you might as well make sure they’re genuine, working emails, and not abandoned. There are a lot of reasons an email address can be considered “dead”. The person doesn’t work at the company anymore, they have a new email, or they marked the first email they received from you as spam, and haven’t opened a single one since. Whatever the reason, validating your mailing list and identifying the good stuff from the junk is a good practice to have. This is where services like XXXXXX come in, where you can get access to a bunch of useful and relevant metrics at a relatively low cost.
Conclusion
It’s not rocket science. Sticking to these 5 simple tips will make a world of difference in your email marketing campaigns. To summarize:
- Spend some money on a corporate domain if you plan on big outreach campaigns;
- Don’t dump a bunch of irrelevant emails into your recipients’ inboxes;
- Warm up your domain;
- Avoid URL shorteners;
- Validate your email base periodically.
