Previously, making the inbox and bypassing spam filters were mostly determined by the content of your emails.

Get a low spam score; your email was sent to the inbox. It bounced due to a high spam score.

While it may seem like email providers such as Gmail and Outlook are fighting to keep your campaigns out of your subscribers’ inboxes, the reality is quite the contrary.

So, how can you assist email providers in determining that your email is authentic and not a spam message?

The content is king

While some people feel that content comes second to deliverability, this could not be farther from the reality. Quality material that is relevant to their requirements is what your subscribers want from you.

Sending out quality content entails sending out more than simply promotional materials. In reality, email marketers should consider including some of the following information into their content strategy:

• Case studies and success stories are examples of supporting information.
• Event details
• Infographics and industry studies are examples of value-added material.
• Customer feedback and new recruit profiles are examples of people-focused material.
• Blogs, how-to videos, and product demos

The key is to have a robust content plan in place, which you can then include into your email marketing approach.

Having a good plan is what will get your material viewed by people who need it the most, whether you are improving your content strategy or beginning from zero.

Establish your objectives

That’s how it goes: fail to plan, plan to fail. What do you want to achieve by producing and distributing content? You’ll be flying blind if you don’t have clear aims. Consider the following questions:

• Do you want to raise awareness?
• Do you want your readers to do something?
• Do you wish to enhance overall conversions with your content?

Determine your target audience

If you don’t know who your audience is, you can’t give them with great material. Hold a brainstorming session and consider who your target audience member is. As with your objectives, you want to be as specific as possible with your vision of your ideal reader. By the conclusion of the session, you should be able to image this human and identify the pain spots that your content will address.

Prepare your content

This is where you start to truly specify what sorts of material your reader wants to get in their inbox and how often they want to receive it.

Will newsletters be the best option for them? Will they prefer material that includes animated GIFs and video clips?

Again, attention to detail is essential. If you send out information that your ideal reader does not find helpful or entertaining, they will either flag your content as spam or cease reading your mails.

What does success look like, and how will it be measured?

This is when having a thorough grasp of your analytics comes into play. Just like with goal setting, you must define success in terms of your desired key performance indicators (KPIs). Consider what your ideal numbers for these KPIs would be:

• Open rates
• Click-through rates
• Bounce rates
• Unsubscription rates

You’ll have reliable standards to measure your accomplishments against if you know what your definition of success is. Then you’ll know what needs to be fixed and when.

Finalize, test, and submit

Always test before sending. Test your subject lines, content, content kinds, and overall design. Test everything, analyze the results, test again, redefine, and then submit.

By doing A/B testing, you’ll be able to better understand what your readers want to see from you. Once you’ve honed down on your most effective combos, complete your campaigns and start sending them out.

Create a fantastic email list

Rather of spending money purchasing or renting email lists, concentrate your efforts on establishing your own. Organic lists (created by individuals opting in to receive your emails) have 5x greater open rates than bought or scraped lists and get 4x fewer spam complaints.

Verify your email addresses

If you use email marketing software such as Campaign Monitor, you may authenticate your emails so that they are sent from your own domain (i.e. yourbusiness.com) rather than the generic domains we manage (I.e. cmail1.com)

Gmail and Outlook see authorized domains as a strong indicator that you are a real firm delivering legitimate email marketing. Because spam organizations often do not go through the authentication procedure, having an authorized domain helps email providers know that you are not a spammer.

Make certain that your email marketing are both relevant and interesting

For marketers, the last piece of the jigsaw is to ensure that each email they send to their subscribers is both relevant and interesting.

Getting your emails into the inbox is entirely dependent on your subscribers’ prior participation with your campaigns, therefore it’s critical that you send relevant and interesting emails that are opened and interacted with on a frequent basis.

Here are a few pointers you may start using right now in your email marketing:

Use a well-known ‘From’ name

The ‘From’ name (together with the subject line) is one of the few tools marketers have at their disposal to induce users to open their campaigns and hence send favorable signals to email providers.

The key to success here is to choose a ‘From’ name that your subscribers are familiar with.

For example, if you subscribe to our email newsletter, would you anticipate to get communications from Campaign Monitor or Aaron Beashel? Given that you signed up for these emails via the Campaign Monitor website, it’s most likely the former.

When delivering email marketing to Groove consumers, Alex Turnbull, the CEO of Groove, does an excellent job at this. In the screenshot below, his name appears as “Alex at Groove” in the from field.

Make use of segmentation

Instead of sending your email to your full list, consider segmenting it and targeting the campaign to individuals you know would be interested.

This ad from The Iconic, an Australian store, is a wonderful example:

Although The Iconic offers women’s apparel and I’m sure had a plethora of new arrivals that week, they know I’m a man and only provide me information on the newest menswear.

This guarantees that the content of their campaign is relevant to me, increasing the likelihood that I will open it and sending good signals back to my email provider that I want The Iconic’s email campaigns in my inbox.

Use a legitimate reply-to address

One of the primary signs used by email providers such as Gmail and Outlook to verify the legitimacy of your emails is whether or not you have previously received replies to your campaigns.

This is reasonable. Nobody ever replies to spammers or unimportant emails; they just ignore or delete them. If you obtain replies to your efforts, email providers will know that these are authentic emails that people care about.

As a result, when building email campaigns, avoid using noreply@yourcompany.com as the reply-to address.

These email addresses communicate to recipients that you are uninterested in hearing from them and minimize the number of replies you get.

Instead, utilize alternatives such as:

• hello@yourcompany.com
• support@yourcompany.com
• yourname@yourcompany.com

Seeing these types of email addresses motivates individuals to reply, and those replies are viewed as favorable signals by email providers, improving your chances of landing in the inbox.

Conclusion

While it may seem like email providers such as Gmail and Outlook are attempting to prevent your efforts from reaching the inbox, the fact is that genuine email campaigns from marketers such as yourself are not a worry for them.

Instead, they’re aiming to stop the 180 billion spam communications that are delivered every day.

So, if you follow some of the ideas in this piece, such as developing a solid email list, verifying your domain, and delivering relevant messages, you should see excellent deliverability rates and a fantastic return on your email marketing efforts.