How to Keep Your Emails Out of Spam Folders this Retail Season

How to Keep Your Emails Out of Spam Folders this Retail Season

The holidays are on the horizon, and that means more than sunshine, barbies, and surfing – it means shopping—a lot of it. In 2020-21, we became one of the largest e-commerce industries in the world, bringing in $50.46 billion in 2020 (2% of the GDP) with 9.1 million Australian households shopping online. And with American traditions like Black Friday and CyberMonday becoming global phenomenon’s in the lead up to the summer holiday season, it’s forecasted that the surge in online purchasing is going to keep growing significantly year on year.

While this is great news for online retailers, it does come with the added crunch of more and more competition. So, how do you make your email marketing campaign stand out? How do you prevent a situation where customers are so bombarded with content that they just give up without reading your email or clicking through? How do you prevent all that effort from landing up in the graveyard that is the spam folder?

Optimising content for email deliverability

Email deliverability is all about avoiding your content ending up in the spam folder before your customers even get a chance to see it. These filters are becoming increasingly sophisticated to protect users from scams, phishing attacks, malware, and junk mail, so it’s important that your email marketing content gets along with these algorithms and doesn’t trigger any alerts.

Some of the factors that impact deliverability include the reputation of your domain name and the IP address you are sending from, the quality of your subscriber list, the design and content of your email, and the relevance and frequency of messaging.

So, here’s what to do.

#1 – Manage your email subscriber lists

Give your email lists a thorough audit before the retail season begins, eliminating unresponsive email addresses that contain errors or have been dormant for 3 months or longer. This clean-up will help ensure that you are only sending emails to real accounts, which will improve the quality of your subscriber list.

#2 – Grow your email lists

Of course, you want as many interested customers as possible on your subscriber list, so start incentivising them to sign up. Something as simple as a small discount for new visitors or unsubscribed visitors to your website is a good start, but you can also use in-store sign-ups, offer a special sign-up discount especially for the various big sales and events of the retail season, early access to sales, or anything else to encourage people to subscribe. It’s also a good idea to encourage referrals by giving existing loyal customers discounts for getting friends to sign up or use their code at purchase.

#3 – Personalise your email marketing

The best way to get whitelisted and avoid the dreaded spam folder is to make sure that people WANT to hear from you. This can be done by segmenting email lists according to interests, demographics, income level, and past purchases. You can then advertise the most relevant specials, offers, and products to the people who are most likely to be interested in them. To further refine this, you can send an email to your customers asking them what content they’d like to get from you. Do they want a general email newsletter, information on sales and discounts, early access emails, emails on particular products or services, or all of the above? The more considerate you are of your consumer, the more likely you are to create content they WANT to act on.

#4 – Be ethical and compliant

Junk mail and unwanted mail is becoming a major consumer concern and can generate bad press for your business – the last thing anyone wants when they want to hit record sales targets. This is also a big trigger for spam filters, so it doesn’t pay off to take a non-targeted, mass-spray approach to email marketing.

To make sure you’re on the right side of consumers, email service providers and the Australian Spam Act, you need to:

  • Get permission to send your content to the recipient
  • Identify your business accurately, including an identifiable mailing address
  • Make it easy to unsubscribe
  • Avoid using subscriber lists from address-harvesting software
  • Avoid using deceptive subject lines

We’ll Take You to the Top this Holiday Season with Affordable Email Marketing for Online Retailers

Our email marketing team works to make your online content more targeted, more competitive, and more effective, making your business stand out from the crowd. If you’d like assistance optimising your digital marketing strategy and email marketing strategy for the holiday season, contact us today – our Melbourne-based team is experienced, friendly, and ready to help!

Melody Sinclair-Brooks

Written by

Michelle van Blerck – Communications Manager

I take a spark and turn it into a fireworks show! From internal client communications to LinkedIn authority articles, social media, and blogs, I write it all. My aim is to represent clients authentically with high-quality content that Google loves. I’ll show consumers why you’re the business they want to work with, buy from, and follow for life!

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