“So make sure to follow these fives tips and you’ll make sure that your email deliverability is as high as it can possibly be.” – Jason Bay in today’s Tip 220
How do you avoiding spam folder?
Join the conversation below and go check out all the links!
Blissful Prospecting
Jason Bay on LinkedIn
Mail-Tester.com
NeverBounce.com
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today Jason Bay from Blissful Prospecting is back with this tip:
Jason Bay: All right, we got an exciting topic today. Avoiding the spam folder. So why should you care about this? If you’re a rep or let’s say you’re a sales manager, you guys are sending cold emails, you’re getting less advanced. If your emails aren’t getting sent and delivered to the inbox and they’re ending up in the spam folder or maybe in the updates or promotions folder. If you’re emailing people that email accounts, it’s less at-bats, you’re spending a ton of time personalizing these hopefully, and it’s just wasted effort. So there’s a couple things to look for in terms of knowing what their deliverability, it might even be a problem. There’s a couple of tests that you can do. So the first thing I would look at is your open rate under emails. If your open rate is below 25% it’s unless the subject line is horrendous, you probably ever having deliverability issues and emails are getting sent to spam and we pushed to get our clients to 50 plus percent open rates. So I would say if your email open rates are under 50% there’s definitely room for improvement. The best way and this is linked in the show notes that you can test this to make sure there isn’t anything wrong with your emails is by sending a test email and it’s free to a website called mail-tester.com and what they’re going to do is spit out a really cool report for you. And what I want to focus on this episode though is primarily what you can do as an individual rep if you’re sending out these emails and then that report that gets spit out, it’ll have a lot of other things in there, like you’ll see SPF and DKIM and all this other sort of technical things. So send that report to your founder or if you have engineers and your team or whoever your it, people that can fix this stuff, send that report over to them. If it says there’s a bunch of problems. In terms of what you can work on as a sales rep and what is primarily it has to do with what you’re putting in the email. So I want to go over a couple of quick things. So the five tips are this,
1. Is avoid using spammy words. And I, there’s a list of 50 of these on a HubSpot article, but I picked about seven or eight here that I see most common in emails that you want to avoid. The first ones, dollar signs. So if you use the dollar sign, you use it very, very sparingly. So trying to make sure that it’s in reference to perhaps a case study or the amount of money that someone saved. And if at all possible, don’t use the dollar sign at all. That’s a really big spam trigger word. Don’t use the word click, don’t use the word free. If you’re using a lot of exclamation marks, that’s another trigger. Subscribe, sign up for you today. Risk-Free guarantee. These are all things you might be using, especially if you’re trying to get someone to sign up for a demo. So don’t use the word signup, use new checkout or “Hey, let’s grab a time to do a demo.” You know, use different verbiage than these. Click free subscribed, sign up and you’ll avoid ending up in the spam folder.
2. Avoid using link shorteners. So if you’re going to hyperlink to which say, which I do suggest that you do, I would turn off link tracking. So link tracking is going to create and if you look at the preview text when you hover over a link in like a newsletter email, you’ll see that it’s a different link than where it actually takes you to spam. Triggers are really good at picking up on that thing and if nothing else, it’ll you know, Landy in the promotions or updates folder. Like I said, if you’re emailing someone that uses G Suite, so don’t use link shorteners and you don’t want to put the full link in the email either. So if I was linking to our website, a blissful prospecting, I might have the words blissful prospecting in the email signature and then I would link to you know the http://blissfulprospecting.com I wouldn’t just say BlissfulProspecting.com and like put the full link in the email and that’s another little hack there.
3. And this is sort of controversial, but you want to provide an easy way to opt-out. Preferably what you would do is provide an unsubscribe link. So make sure that you have an unsubscribe link, but don’t use the word unsubscribe in the link. What we use is don’t want to receive these emails anymore, question mark and that hyperlinks to a way to unsubscribe to the emails. So make it easy to unsubscribe. If it’s not easy and people don’t want to receive emails from you, they’re going to click send to spam and that’s going to make more of your emails going to the spam folder.
4. High bounce rates. You really should be below 5% bounce rates and ideally you’re only around one to 2% so if your list quality’s really bad, you can use a software called NeverBounce.com you guys can scrub your list before you’re sending them out and you may or may not be in charge of building your own less, but if you are or you have a sales enablement team doing this for you, make sure that you guys are using something like NeverBounce. And lastly
5. Don’t email too frequently. I know that, again, this is controversial and probably will make you pick up the phone more, so you really want to space out the emails at least two to three days apart. I see a lot of, especially in SAAS land where people are emailing someone every day, cold emailing them every day and that’s just too much. Again, it’s not, Hey, I’m sure it works, right? Some of the time it works, but the rest of the time people are getting really irritated and sending your stuff to spam. So we space out our emails two to three days apart, and as the cadence progressive and as we send more emails and more weeks go by, if we haven’t heard back from somewhere, emailing them, less than, less than less, we aren’t continuing to hound them every other day. Now again, this is a good reason for you to be picking up the phone or getting on social and re-engaging the prospect in a different channel. So make sure to follow these five tips and you’ll make sure that your email deliverability is as high as it can possibly be.
Scott Ingram: For links to all things Jason Bay, including the mail tester website that he mentioned you can click over to DailySales.Tips/220. We always provide transcripts of the tips on the site as well and this is one where it might be helpful to have Jason’s breakdown of all 5 tips.
As always, I appreciate you listening to the podcast. Please make sure you’re subscribed in your favorite podcast app and come back tomorrow for another great sales tip!