Every day hundreds of billions of emails are sent across the internet, and unfortunately, a sizeable chunk is malicious, unwanted spam. To make sure your inbox isn’t overwhelmed with undesired email mail clients like Outlook as well as security software take a conservative approach when choosing to block or allow email from reaching the recipient's inbox.
While there’s no way to guarantee your email will never end up in someone’s spam box or completely blocked by security software, we can help mitigate these problems as much as possible. There’s plenty of information out there on this topic, but here are the easy-to-manage actions that have been shown to deliver the best results:
- Remove Invalid Emails
- Avoid using link Shorteners
- Images-To-Text-Ratio
- Fonts And Text
- Still Not Making It To The Inbox?
As people leave firms and companies fold and open, emails are constantly being created and shut down in the world of Capital Markets. Whether you receive your email bounce notifications from us or just straight from the recipient, we suggest removing these emails as soon as possible. Sending to invalid emails is behaviour consistent with spammers, so making sure you’re sending to ‘clean’ lists is the best way to prevent your note from ending up in spam.
At Street Context we see a huge correlation in people who report deliverability problems and people who don’t remove invalid contacts. Anything higher than 2% of your list bouncing back can lead to long-term sender reputation problems with ISPs - something that can have a huge impact on your content’s ability to reach your recipient’s inbox.
While it may be a bit more aesthetically pleasing to shorten some of those long URLs, some mail clients and security software find these to be a bit suspicious. It’s fairly straightforward to create hyperlinks in Outlook instead - Just follow a tutorial here to learn how.
Keep your image-to-text ratio low. Images are OK to include in your email articles, but never send image-only emails with no text. Optimize your images for email by compressing them first. Don’t use super high-resolution images or other media with a large file size.
Avoid using obscure fonts. Stick with fonts that work across most platforms, like Arial, Verdana, Georgia and Times New Roman. Avoid all uppercase letters and unusual punctuation such as exclamation points and the dollar sign in the subject line. Lastly, avoid spam-triggering words such as; buy, free, stock pick, click here, discount, great offer, sales, etc.
Still Not Making It To The Inbox?
The best course of action is always to suggest to your recipient to add you as a Safe Sender. It only takes a few clicks and it’s the best way to ensure your recipient’s email client doesn’t make the same mistake again - According to Outlook, emails from Safe Senders are never sent to the spam folder.
And if that still doesn’t work, just ask your subscribers to let an IT person at their firm know there’s a problem can help quickly resolve it. We recommend something as simple as:
“Hi, can you pass along the problem to an IT person at your firm? Just give them my email and ask for it to be whitelisted.”
Including a subject line and time sent of a recent email can speed up the process as well.
If you're ever having any trouble, please reach out to Street Context's support team as it's our mission to make email deliverability the best it can possibly be for all of our customers. We're always here to help guide you through any problems and make sure your email is hitting those inboxes!