6 Hacks to Reduce User-Reported Spam Rates to Maximise your Email Marketing Strategy
Written by
Tejas Pitkar
Tejas Pitkar
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6 Hacks to Reduce User-Reported Spam Rates to Maximise your Email Marketing Strategy

Published : October 23, 2018
6 Hacks to Reduce User-Reported Spam Rates

Murphy’s Law aptly states that whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.

The age-old adage also applies to a primary email inboxing as well! A good run could suddenly spiral into the deeper hells of spam. The culprit: user-reported spam rates!

Google Postmaster has a very up-to-date record of your mailing pattern and provides the spam rate information for every day that you send emails from your sending domain.

As an email marketer, what you need to realise is that it is not only the delivery of the mails that matters, how your email campaign is received by the intended user is also important.

If you send an email campaign about a lucrative job opportunity to a subscriber who has already accepted an offer and joined an organisation, the said user is not going to perceive your email in a positive way. Instead, the person might use the button Gmail has provided to report this email as spam, as it no longer is of any value to him. Neither is the email content personalised, neither is it contextual in nature.

A consistent spam rate of 0.1% for an extended time will also lead to Gmail filtering emails as spam. If a sizable segment of your subscriber list – about 0.2 – 0.3% – is doing that, Gmail will start filtering your email campaigns as spam from the very next day.

As we know that recurring spam makes the Gmail reputation drop, causing the primary inboxing rates to suffer significantly.

All that time, effort, and money invested in your email marketing campaigns account for poor results! Isn’t that a terrible position to be in?

But, don’t fret!

The Email Deliverability Experts at Netcore have your back, every step of the way.

Here are 6 bullet-proof hacks to prevent your IPR falling prey to user-reported spam rates, on your way to driving higher primary inboxing and resulting conversions:

  1. Honey, I shrunk the list!”
    Keeping your regular subscriber list as clean as possible is really critical.  That entails regular cleaning of your list every 3 months, i.e., look at the database you target for your mailing, and every 3 months or so have a look at the engagement of those subscribers.

    Those who are opening and clicking your mails, visiting your brand website, deserve to be kept as 5 star subscribers and those who have not opened emails for 3 months need to be moved out of your list! A difficult but necessary step.

    Keeping a healthy and active subscriber list will mean that you will be targeting the right audience, therefore, generating more business as they are truly engaged with your content.

  2. Don’t waste too much time engaging with inactive subscribers

    Keeping that mailing list as recent as possible also means that you stop targeting any old subscribers (those who registered over 6 months ago).

    As a modern marketer the question you need to consider how to target the historic email IDs relevant to my business and still manage to get some openers from this segment?

    This is essentially inactive data and we can treat those subscribers differently by sending them different kinds of mailers to grab their attention again. But, they are a strict no-no for your regular mailing as these users are the majority who mark your mails as spam as they are irrelevant to them.

    Learn how Smartech helped Myntra, India’s leading online fashion platform, elevate email campaign performance!
  3. Use only double opt-in verification
    Very often, a certain brand’s website may not have a double-opt in verification and as such they might be accepting random IDs for their newsletter subscriptions.

     This kind of database will have to be cleaned or profiled, as they might contain invalid or fake email IDs and worst of all, spam traps! To counter this, we at Smartech always check the credentials of the source of these IDs when cleansing these mailing lists.

    Double opt-in is always a good green flag to proceed with the mailing, as it means that the subscribers have been sent an email before, confirming their authenticity and interest with the brand.

    Single opt-in collected IDs are considered suspicious by leading Email Service Providers (ESPs).  It is always a good practice to collect your users’ preferences during the opt-in process to ensure that the quality and hygiene levels of your mailing list remain consistently high.

  4. Avoid purchased lists to target users
    Some wrong practices are always prevalent in every industry and one such practice in email marketing is the purchase of email databases from other spamming agencies. This is an absolute disastrous practice to follow as none of those users are expecting your emails in their inbox and as such the user-reported spam rate will be significantly higher for such mailing activities.

    The idea is to fine-tune your targeting with the most personalised, contextualised, and relevant content. Smartech enables you to do just that by rigorously adhering best practices to maximise primary inbox delivery.

    Email marketing is always a long term game-play and requires a great deal of patience and optimisation. While you will always be tempted to purchase these email databases, it is advisable to say “no”!

    These lists might be ready made, but they’re not tailor-made…to suit your marketing campaign requirements.

  5. Cap your campaign delivery frequency You can’t expect your users to check out your new campaign every other day, unless you are an e-commerce or travel platform attempting to drive adoption and transactions using attractive offers on products and packages regularly.Limiting your frequency of campaigns down to once or twice a week is an ideal way to keep your users engaged with your brand and come out with more solid content in your creatives to lure them to boost conversions.There is no set blueprint for delivery frequency, as it is still appropriate to send an expecting user 2 different mails on the same day. So, it all depends on their preferences and when they prefer receiving such communication.

    Learn how you can leverage the power of AI to deliver the right message to the right user at just the right time!

  6. Focus on your content creatives The essence behind having an attractive offer is to not only to dazzle engaged subscribers with the variety you can offer them, but also, build on your creative content and keep exploring new ways to design your HTML in keeping pace with industry trends.Visually appealing content that uses engaging images, GIF, and videos are more likely to nudge openers to click on your well-positioned CTAs. This also drastically reduces the chances of your mail being marked as spam.Another way to consider creatives is to have unique creatives for each campaign which could distinguish your content from different brands.

    Trust us. When we say that following these practices will help you to keep those spam rates to a minimum and ensure that your email campaigns hit exceptional primary inboxing rates, we truly mean it!

    Lower your spam rates and better your email deliverability, greater the chances of maximising your conversions and marketing ROI.

    Sounds promising? Schedule a demo, today!

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