5 Technical Tips To Get More Opens & Clicks For Your Emails
Email is not different from the rest: you have the form on one side and the content on the other. When optimizing an email, you need to work on the content as well as on the technical routing. Today, I will focus on the “form” and the “technique” rather than the content. These advices are very simple and easy to apply. To go further, I highly recommend that you have a look at our White Paper, Email Marketing For Online Retailers.
1- The lists: prefer quality over quantity
You need a clean list: no renting, no buying. It is prohibited by the law. Plus, the restrictions of the ISPs are even tougher than the legislation. These latter systematically spot this kind of practices and can block all the emails at anytime.
Cherry on top, very often, the provider who rents or sells the list is often looking for easy money, without bothering about the consequences. We know about this at Mailjet, as we often have to contact victims of such scams. When the poor dupe client realizes that his bought list is unusable and full of “spam traps”, it’s already too late. 95% of the time, the seller refuses to give the money back. This happens so often…
My advice: from the beginning, focus your resources on building a relevant list. Ignore anyone coming up to you, trying to sell you an “easy-way” story. These people don’t care about your business : they’re scammers.
II - Respect your subscribers : they are not tolerant
Once you have a nice opt-in contact list, you need to make sure that the (mandatory) unsubscribe link is clearly visible. More and more often, the recipients simply choose to click on the “report as spam” button in order to unsubscribe. Each of these signals is considered as a complaint: this can kill your IP reputation in a flash. For more details on how this happens, please see my post: Why you should keep your spam rate below 0,1%.
And of course: if the subscriber flags you as spam, you immediately need to take this into account. You can request this information (i.e. feedback loops) to the ISPs (Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.), but this process is pretty laborious. Therefore, the best thing to do is to use an Email Service Provider (ESP) that does it for you. If you keep on emailing a person who already signaled you as spam, you will immediately get the worst case scenario: “blacklisted”.
III - Authentication: configure and personalize your SPF & DKIM
One more time, it is something quite laborious to do by yourself, but most of the ESPs will provide this by default : this is a lesser evil. Without SPF / DKIM, your emails would bounce at all the major ISPs.
But very few Email Service Providers will personalize these certificates without making you pay for it. To learn more on this important matter, you should read a post I’ve made recently, about the importance of SPF / DKIM personalisation.
IV - The image / text ratio
Images are very often used by spammers. Therefore, the antispam filters take this parameter into account : you need to be careful with the way you use images. These must not dominate the text in a blatant way.
Of course, it is useless to try to compensate the equilibrium of the ratio by adding some text. This is what spammers already do. It’s better to keep this rule in mind: stay as light as you can and… always test.
V- Optimize vocabulary
We could say that this has more to do with the content rather than the form. But it’s not the case: being careful to the words you use is purely technical. There a some words to avoid: “Viagra”, “money” and “penis”, these are evident. Of course you already knew it :-) But more surprisingly, a lot of plain words can have a negative impact: “free”, “present” or “opportunity” for exemple.
Hence, you should always test and check the “spam score”. Your email service will often provide this information. If you’re a big sender who desires to go further in optimization, you can use some tools such as Litmus, to previsualize the campaign results.
