Good Email Practices

Good Email Practices

Even if you are not a spammer and spend hours crafting engaging messages to your customers who willingly agreed to receive them, in the eyes of mailbox providers like Gmail and Apple Mail, you may be indistinguishable from traditional spammers. Consequently, your emails are automatically ending up in the Spam box or Promotional tab, affecting the deliverability of your email marketing efforts.

Below are some good email practices that you can follow to help you avoid this pitfall.

Maintain a healthy mailing list:

Clean your list before sending your first email to avoid spam traps, duplicate emails, outdated contacts and emails with spelling mistakes. Platformly offers integrations with email validation and verification services like EmailListVerify and Clearout that can help you clean your mailing list. You can watch our video here on how the Clearout.io integration works.
Remove generic email addresses like info@example.com and fake email addresses like testing@qwerty.com
Use confirmed opt-in forms to reduce entry errors when collecting email addresses online.
Keep an eye on bounce-back emails, complaining users, and inactive recipients as these recipients can have a direct impact on your sender reputation. Note that with Platformly, in the case of a hard bounce, Platformly will automatically clean and notify you of removed email addresses.
After each campaign, keep a close eye on your engagement metrics and optimize your mailing list accordingly. With Platformly, you can easily view the engagement metrics of your contacts at the top of your list of contacts, where you can see the number of active subscribers, number of inactive subscribers, number of unsubscribes for your contact list.



Review your email contents:

Don't use ALL CAPS in your email subject.
Use short and effective email subject lines. In Gmail and other popular email managers, you see a preview of the email contents right after the subject line. Keep your subject lines short and use the preview of the email to intrigue your audience.
Avoid sending emails that are HTML heavy. Instead, send emails that are text based, have a clean format and are easy to read. Text-based emails create an impression that a friend sent it while emails heavy on design are usually associated with promotional newsletters.
Don't use link shorteners such as bit.ly inside your emails as it is a technique frequently used by professional spammers. Make sure that any link included in your emails is from your own domain.
Don't include too many hyperlinks or images in your email body.
Avoid using salesy words in your email body, e.g. "sale", "promotion", "opportunity"... This will help you avoid the Gmail's Promotions tab.

Here is a list of words that you should avoid using:



Be sure to use Platformly's Check Spam Score option when creating your emails. The spam score of 5 and the higher the score is, the more likely it will be that your email will be viewed as spam.



Ask recipients to move you out of the Promotions Tab into to the Primary Tab in Gmail. There are 2 ways to do this:

Ask your subscribers, perhaps in your Welcome Email, to add your email address to their contacts list. Emails from a contact always go to the Primary inbox.
Include messages in your newsletters/emails to remind users to move your email from the Promotions Tab to the Primary Tab. They can do this by clicking and dragging one of your emails from the Promotions tab and dropping it in the Primary Tab. By doing this, all future emails from you will be delivered to the Primary tab.



Personalize your email by addressing the person by the name in a subject line or in the beginning of the email. With Platformly, you can personalize both the subject and body content of the email by simply selecting the green personalize icon as shown below and selecting the information that you want to personalize, e.g. First Name.

Updated on: 30/12/2021