Imagine being in your office, middle of the day, loaded with work and a constantly buzzing mobile. After a while, you annoyingly check your phone, only to find yourself tons of email notifications from brands you don’t even recognize. Your obvious action would be either marking them as read of deleting them without checking. This is the kind of bad email marketing that has taken a toll on possibly the best marketing tool. Email Marketing is probably the most underrated but most rewarding form of marketing in terms of ROI. According to Hubspot, if you invest 1Rs into Email Marketing, the return in Rs.43! That’s how effective it can be on your returns, if executed correctly.

Here are 10 things to avoid your emails from getting into spam.

1. Before sending out your emails, check for your SPAM SCORE. There are lot of free and paid tools available online to help you determine your spam score. Eg., glockapps.com, mail-tester.com etc.
2. Check for grammatical errors and punctuation marks, as they can cause your mail to be spammed.
3. Check if your domain name is already blacklisted. If this is the case, no matter how good your emails are, they very inadvertently go into spam.
4. The Subject Line should be crisp and clear. Do not try to be very funky or write misleading subject lines just to catch user attention. The more simple and clear your subject, the more chances of your user opening up the mail.
5. Ideally your subject should be under 45 characters. DO NOT use more than 1 exclamation mark in your subject.
6. Don’t use all capital letters in your subject. This triggers the spam filter.
7. Avoid using too many links or restricted keywords in the body text to avoid spam. The message in your mail should be simple and effective, with a clear call to action that you would like your users to take.Do not beat around the bush with long descriptive texts as no one has the time to read a story while at work.
8. Avoid using phrases like ‘to unsubscribe” or “to opt out” in your body text. This triggers the spam filter too.
9. Use the “bcc” function when sending out mails to multiple users at a time. Check for “bad emails” in your email list. Bad emails ids are the ones that are not genuine or the user inbox is full. Basically, any email id which would cause a bounce is called a bad email.
10. And last but not the least, treat your users inbox as your own inbox and have some empathy. Do not overburden your user with a series of meaningless emails. Only send out mails regarding things your users would genuinely be interested in.

That is how you design an effective email marketing campaign that works!