Online marketing has been becoming more competitive and expensive over the recent years. So, how do you promote your business if you are a startup or a small business with limited marketing budget?
Cold email marketing can be a very cost effective channel for startups to get some early customers – if you know how to avoid the spam filters.
First, you will need to understand why certain emails get trapped in SPAM. Once your understand how spam filters work and what signals they look for, it becomes very easy to avoid them.
Table Of Contents
1. Unit economics of cold email marketing
2. How to avoid spam filters in email marketing
2.1 Use cold email automation
2.2 Personalize your emails
2.3 Build up and maintain your sender reputation
2.4 Use a disposable email address
2.5 Write interesting emails
Unit economics of cold email marketing
It costs little or no money to send cold emails. But the main costs of cold email marketing are incurred to get the email addresses of your prospects. Building your mailing list is the most cost intensive element in cold email marketing.
When most of the cost of your email marketing campaign is associated with building an email list, each email address in that list is very valuable. You should therefore try to get a response from each person on the mailing list.
But each time your email is either bounced, ignored or sent to spam, your investment that email address is lost.
Your email campaigns will become productive only when majority of your emails are opened.
The first step to ensure this is to get your emails delivered to the inbox, instead of getting trapped in spam. That’s why it becomes very important to bypass spam filters.
How to avoid spam filters in email marketing
SPAM filters look at multiple factors in each email to decide whether it is spam or not.
They look at email sending behavior. If you use a email marketing tool (like mailchimp) to send out a bulk email blast, spam filters can see thousands of emails being sent to a large group of people, not related to each other (for example, not belonging to the same company). That is a good sign that the email is probably spam.
SPAM filters also look at the email text and subject lines. If you regularly send exactly the same email text to hundreds of different people, there is a good chance that you are spamming them. That’s why it is so important to personalize your emails.
Next, spam filters also look at who is sending the emails and what is the reputation of that sender’s email address. That’s why your sender score is important. If many of your emails get bounced, ignored or flagged as spam, that hurts your reputation as a sender. As a result, your future emails become increasingly prone to be filtered as spam.
Here are some tips to guide you on how to avoid the spam filter.
1. Use cold email automation
If bulk emails are more likely to get flagged as spam, you should just stop sending them. Instead, use cold email automation tools. They stagger hundreds of your marketing emails over a period.
So, instead of sending an email to thousand recipients at once, your account will keep dripping your marketing emails one by one, 2-3 minutes apart. You can select a period over which all the emails must be sent. Accordingly, the cold emailing software can schedule and automate your email campaigns.
Using a cold emailing tool will definitely help you avoid the spam filters and make sure your emails go to inbox.
Next, it is up to you to write engaging emails. Personalizing your email text will definitely help to engage your readers.
2. Personalize your emails
Never keep sending the same subject lines and same text to hundreds of people. A little personalization will help you in a big way to get past the spam filters.
Many people personalize the email text but not the subject lines. In fact it is often more important to personalize the subject lines to improve your email opening rate. You can use a mail merge tool connected to Gmail, Spreadsheets and Docs to create highly personalized email with simple automation.
SafeMailer’s cold email marketing app will help you with deeper personalization of your marketing emails.
3. Build up and maintain your sender reputation
Minimize the bounce rate of your email campaigns. You can use an email list verification tool like this one to get rid of invalid emails or SPAM traps.
Also, ensure that you are sending emails to only those readers who are engaging with your content. Regularly monitor the opening rate and click rates of your campaigns and remove those email addresses who are not engaging with your emails anymore.
Check out how can monitor your campaign’s engagement stats with SafeMailer’s cold email automation tool.
Also, make it easy for recipients to unsubscribe from your mailing list. This way they won’t be forced to flag you as a spammer.
Regularly check the sender score or reputation of your domain, to ensure you stay clear of any troubles. Having a decent sender score is absolutely necessary to land your emails in inbox and not spam.
4. Use a disposable email address
But despite of your best efforts, sometimes there is still a risk that your email account can be flagged as spam. In that case you don’t want it to be your primary email account, used for regular business emails.
Instead you can create a disposable domain, similar to your primary domain name. For example, if your primary domain name is – www.thebestapp.com, then you can register another domain by the name – www.getthebestapp.com and use that for setting up the email accounts for your marketing campaigns.
Even in the case that your marketing email address gets flagged for spam, your primary business email account is still unscathed.
5. Write interesting emails
By now, you understand how to make sure emails go to inbox and avoid spam filters. But these tips will help in the initial phases of your email outreach.
Afterwards, it is up to you to write genuinely interesting and valuable emails. So that the readers will want to take 2 minutes of their time to read and respond to it.
If they don’t engage after 2-3 emails, they probably don’t find your emails useful or interesting. Then you must remove them from your mailing list, to maintain your sender reputation and also so that they are not forced to flag you as a spammer.
Basically, you have 2-3 chances to make an impression. So use them wisely.