When you’re doing email marketing, it’s obvious that your email needs to stand out. You gotta convey your message very strongly with a deal that they cannot deny.
However, what’s the use of a well-written email that does not get through? When you’re doing permission-based marketing with email as your medium, you want to make sure your message is delivered and not filtered out by the email service providers.
So apart from dressing your email to kill with useful content, what else can be done to increase the probability of our message getting through?
Sell Trust Before You Sell Anything Else
Always keep in mind that the main element of a successful email marketing campaign is killer content that delivers its promise. Your main aim is to make your content so compelling that your readers do anything and everything to have your message in their inbox. Whether it is keeping out a diligent eye on their spam filters or directly complaining to their email service providers. When your subscribers know you give out real value that they cannot afford to miss, you can be rest assured that your messages won’t miss their targets.
Nowadays, newsletters have turned into loud sales pitches. This not only puts out a wrong impression, but also makes them boring pieces of digital information that no one’s interested to read. It’s your job to give away quality content that helps, so your readers have a reason to open each and every message you send, trusting you all the way.
Great content that’s original and useful builds a high level of trust and boosts your credibility. Without this first initial strategy in place, the other tactics won’t give the needed results. However, there are some practical techniques that you need to get into place to increase the chances of your messages being safely delivered.
1. Good Autoresponder = Amazing Start for Your Newsletter
Autoresponders can prove to be a great tool if used the right way. It gives you a hands free experience, while you take care of the other important things. By using a good autoresponder for your marketing purpose, you’ll be able to pre-schedule the defined sequences to send out to your subscribers. No matter how many subscribers join in, all of them would get the same first message, which means their experience would be the same even though they join in on different times.
This takes away your headache of keeping up with your new subscribers. No matter what gets you busy this week, your autoresponder takes care of your new subscribers, warmly welcoming them aboard.
By using a value-driven autoresponder, you slowly build a long term foundation for a new, enriching relationship with your new reader. Like they say, the first impression is the last impression. This way, your first few messages work on creating that friendly feeling which goes a long way in strengthening your relationship further in the future.
2. Get Warm and Friendly Right in the Start
This strategy never fails to achieve a good start with your new subscriber helps you build a strong rapport with your email list.
In the starting phase of your autoresponder sequence (you can put it in the message two or three), add a welcoming message with a personal touch to it, greeting the reader in a cheerful manner. Be a little casual in your approach, and put in something informal such as, “Hey, nice to have you aboard, hope you have fun reading and please feel free to get in touch.”
Any relationship stands on a feeling of mutual trust. By doing this, you’re not faking anything or fooling your subscribers with your message, but instead you’re trying to create that personal bond, a feeling of trust. This is the time when you should ask them for any honest comments, feedback or if they have any questions, and tell them upfront how much you love hearing from them.
Make this message as simple as possible, I’d recommend using only text, and not use any HTML.
3. Hop onto their White List
Spam filters can be a real pain at times. Even with top email service providers, some messages might get blocked. One of the best ways to stop this from occurring is to educate your readers and let them know that they need to add you to their “white list”, which is nothing but a list of safe senders. To get this done, all you have to do is to ask them.
Suppose you’ve got a message in your email sequence that talks about “making money”, what you could do is, notify your reader in the message that comes right before it and explain them that the next upcoming email in the sequence might end up in the in spam filter, so they should add you in their white list.
Some readers are well aware about this problem and will white list you immediately, while the others won’t. So it’s your responsibility to make sure that you get yourself onto their safe senders list as soon as possible.
4. Conversations Are Never One Sided
In order to keep everything moving smoothly, get a real person to keep an eye on the replies that come as a result of your email marketing. This individual needs to give out good, thoughtful replies to all the messages received, in a personal tone.
It’s always a good idea to insert a person’s name in the “From” field, instead of having your company name in place. It just makes complete sense to get your emails as personalized and real as possible, so that your readers don’t feel that they are interacting with a computer program.
When you start encouraging people to get in touch with you directly, it just increases the comfort level. The feedback and questions you get is one of the best ways to get into your customers shoes and analyze their wants/needs.
5. Don’t Go Crazy Over Spam Triggers
Many of the reputed email service providers let you know of all the hot, trigger buttons that will most likely be counted as spam mail. A few of these are obvious, such as brand names from pharmaceutical companies.
However, you’d find other words and phrases that are counted as triggers, which are needed to make a strong sale. For instance, we all know how important are call to actions, but links with “click here” can turn out to look spammy to the filters, which significantly reduces your chances of getting better results.
This is one of the main reasons why it makes more sense to have your long, detailed sales copy on your landing page, and keep your email message less persuasive.
Last but not the least, all spam problems will be solved once you start writing for real people, rather than trying to make filters happy. When you deliver good, high quality content and get thumbs up from your readers, there’s no spam filter that can block your messages.
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