Your Emails Look a Lot Like Spam. 😬

Did you know that some of your emails might actually be going into people's spam folder?

So I'm a Kajabi user, I love Kajabi and I love their CRM, their email management system, but even if you don't use Kajabi, if you use a different platform like Infusionsoft or MailChimp, or something like that, if you're using one of those platforms and sending out emails, some of them might actually be going into people's junk mail folder.

In this video, I want to talk about why that might be happening and how to prevent it.

*** Full Transcription Below ***

Before I launch into this, will you do me a quick favor and just hit the subscribe button like the video and even share the video? That would mean the world to me. All right, let's get started.

I'm going to talk a lot from the Kajabi website all about the subject and so if you want to click below, you can look at their links. They talk about it better than I could, but I'm going to kind of summarize it based on what I understand as well as information I've learned from other sources.

But email has to kind of get approved from like an email service provider or an internet service service provider. And think of email as sort of like credit and the ESP, the email service provider is sort of like monitoring your credit score, like FICO or something like that. And if you have good credit they'll allow you to send the email through. So your email system is sort of based on your reputation as a sender.

Now, how do you build a good reputation?

Well a huge part of that is engagement. It's how often and how much your users, people that are in your email database, are actually clicking and opening the email and not just hitting delete. And it's how much they actually go to the links, and reply back... Things like that.

So one of the first things you can do, first things you can do, number one rule is set up what we call a double opt in. An opt in is all about the form you use on your website to collect email addresses. A double opt in is after they've put in their email address and hit submit, they're going to get an email that says, please verify this email. And by them verifying it, it sends an email back from there internet, from their email back to you, back to your service, back to your email address that you've had the reply to. And what that does is it shows engagement right off the bat. It shows the internet service provider or the ESP that this person legitimately does want to receive emails from you. You don't have to do this, but it's a really good practice and it's very easy to set up.

Next, your email needs to be set up so that people can unsubscribe. You know that little button you see at the bottom of an email that says unsubscribe immediately or whatever, that actually legitimizes your email. It gives people the option to unsubscribe. And in fact, if you have an email database, if you're sending out a newsletter through email, by law, you're supposed to have that button on there. If you don't have that, it looks very fishy. It looks like spam.

Next you have to have a physical address. Now if you're using a legitimate email CRM like MailChimp, they're going to require you to have an physical address on there. They won't even let you set up an account unless you have a physical address and typically it's going to be your home address. Well, as you build followers, you really don't want your home address at the bottom of every email. So I strongly suggest setting up a PO box at a UPS store or the US Post Office and using that as your PO box as your physical address. That physical address actually also legitimizes your email to your ESP and allows that traffic to move through so it doesn't go into people's junk mail.

Another great thing you can do is your reply to address should be something other than the provider of the email service that you have. If it's your personal email or an legitimate often used work email or something like that, that's going to look way better to the ESP than just something like Mailchimp.blah blah.. .you Know, whatever.com it looks a lot better if it's a real email address that's actively used.

The next part is kind of obvious. Your text in your subject line needs to sound real. If it sounds fishy or has spammy kind of words in it, like free credit report or enlargement pills or something like that, it will probably bounce immediately by any ESP. Now in a second, I'll tell you about a lot of keywords to stay away from, but right off the bat, make your subject line something that sounds legitimate, tha sounds real.

And along the same lines, do not capitalize the full subject text. In fact, limit yourself to any capitalization of full words. You might have one or two words in there that has a capitalization that's probably going to be fine, but it needs to be less than 50% of the text in the subject line should be capitalized. In fact, just as a side note, I had a friend that used to text and write emails to me and he always typed in all caps and I always thought he was upset with me. And one day it just triggered me and I said, why are you always yelling at me about everything? And he's like, "I had no idea." He didn't know that's what people use to yell through email or text. He had no idea. And the standards of practice for writing emails is not a very techie person and didn't write much. So I had to get school him a little bit and he looked it up and he goes, Oh, I'm so sorry. I've never meant to yell at you about anything. And it totally made sense. But just keep that in mind. Don't don't capitalize all words very often at all. It looks really, really spammy.

Okay, let's talk about the trigger words that you should not be using. These are some of them.

Act now affordable. Apply now. Free leads, free offer credit bureaus, earn money, email marketing, multilevel marketing. S. ave money, promise free gift, extra income.

Those are words you want to stay away from in your subject. It will trigger those ESPs from preventing your mail going through. So just be very cautious about using any of those words. Again, I'm going to put this list below. You can click that and keep that handy if you want to.

Of course, the very best way to get engagement is by engaging with them, by emailing people directly, personally, and by actually asking people in the email blasts to reply to you. So if you give them a challenge or give them something in the email that says, "Hey, reply back with your interest in this, or maybe a suggestion you might have or any testimonial of success, I'd love to hear from you". Those types of statements in your emails can conjure up replies, which is going to give you more credit to the ESP.

Lastly, it's really good practice to sometimes clean out your email database. Meaning remove people that have not engaged, that have not opened up your emails in the last 90 days. You might stretch that out to maybe six months. Say, if anybody has not opened an email of mine in six months and I've been sending all these emails, they need to be removed from my list because that'll help your percentages of open and click rates go up. If you don't have a huge amount of people that aren't opening those emails up, does that make sense? You're sort of rewarded by the percentage of people that open and click through in your email.

I hope that's helped you guys. I enjoy talking about this stuff. Let me know if you have any questions.

Xxx - Zion

Resources:

Link 1

Link 2