It feels like one of life’s impossibilities as a business owner… you’ve grown a fabulous community and you want to stay in touch with them regularly.
You know your content is great, but it’s a constant battle to beat through the obstacles that stop your well crafted communications actually being read by your intended recipients.
Obstacles such as;
- Spam filters that send your carefully crafted prose to the Bermuda Triangle AKA Junk Mail folders
- Overflowing inboxes where most of the emails get deleted without being read
- Grabbing the attention of your readers enough that they open the email
Barrier Number 1: Spam Filters
There are ways of avoiding your email being flagged up as spam… avoid using words such as “free” or talking about “huge profits” etc in both the subject line and the body of the email.
Spam filters scan the email content and award it a score based on how many (or few) of these “hot” words of phrases are used. If the “hot” words or phrases recur too often, the score goes above a pre-determined limit and the email is flagged up as spam.
Acceptable scores vary between each spam filter provider but it is worthwhile to run your email through a good spam checker such as Contactology.com before you send it, so you can make amendments if it looks to be in danger of being marked as spam and not reaching inboxes.
Barrier Number 2: Overflowing Inboxes
We can’t circumnavigate this barrier… we’re all facing email overwhelm… but if we’ve taken care of the first barrier, we can increase the chances of our emails being noticed by paying close attention to barrier number 3…
Barrier Number 3: Attention Grabbing Subject Lines
Keep your subject lines short… the recommended maximum characters is 70, but in fact, if your recipients could be reading your emails on their mobiles, then your maximum characters reduce even more… to 20!
The maximum character limit is to allow the full subject line to be seen when recipients are scanning their inbox deciding which emails to open. Get creative… keep the subject lines short and snappy, and don’t use convoluted subject lines with the power phrases shoved at the end.
Make sure your readers know who has sent them the email too… whether to use your personal name or the business name will depend on your own market intelligence, but don’t replace names with random words and characters which aim to confuse.
I once received an email with the sender’s name shown as “hello”… I don’t know anyone called “hello” (not unless you’ve changed your name without telling me!) so my first reaction was suspicion that it was going to be a junk message that had somehow escaped the clutches of my spam filter.
Out of curiosity I did open it, and it was a message promoting an event… but while it caught my eye… it was mostly for the wrong reasons so I don’t recommend you copy the idea.
So now you’ve increased the chances of your emails getting through to your audience, what great content can you share with them today?
I invite you to apply the strategies I’ve shared with you here to the next email you send to your list… and come back to this blog and leave me a comment to let me know how your open rates improved as a result. If you have any of your own tips for getting your emails seen by more people, I’d love to hear those too?
