5 Practical Tips to Improve Your Inbox Placement - Story From: The Official Infusionsoft Blog

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In an email deliverability study published by ReturnPath, it was discovered that only 81 percent of messages actually reach the inbox sent by commercial email senders. This means that approximately 2 out of 10 messages either land in the spam folder or go missing. While this statistic remains an industry average, there are several tips to help your messages reach the inbox regularly.

The 2011 study was conducted by email reputation provider, ReturnPath. They concluded that inbox placement remains a challenge for marketers across the globe and only marginally improved from 2009. The report also reveals that B2B messages have a slight disadvantage over B2C messages. It’s alright, all is not lost, yet. Read the full report from ReturnPath, which includes international results and best practices.

2011 Email Deliverability Report, Source: ReturnPath

Unfortunately, there isn’t a magic “formula” for hitting the inbox because email providers utilize many factors to determine how they handle incoming messages. However, there are practical tips that will help your messages appear in the inbox more frequently than your competitors.

1. Use Reputable Domains for Links

If your email contains untrusted links, it may result in being flagged by spam filters and placed in the junk folder. Practically, this means avoiding untrusted links generated from link shortening services (Bit.ly, TinyURL, t.co, etc). Spammers frequently abuse these services and ISPs will look twice when they see these links. Trusted link sources include the links generated from email service providers such as Automation Links in Infusionsoft.

2. Segment Your List & Send Less

With careful discipline to not send to everyone on an email list, the sender is able to deliver targeted messages to people who are truly expecting it. Response rates increase, subscribers are happy and so is the business. Narrow segments give the marketers more liberties to take with recipients. For instance, if we have a customer event in Dallas, TX, we would have higher response to emailing recipients in Texas versus the other 49 states. The takeaway is to send responsibly.

3. Encourage Recipient Engagement

In simple terms, this means enticing recipients to show images, whitelist the email sender, click the links and frequently open the emails sent to them. ISPs track these actions to judge whether people want your email and in turn, places messages in the inbox or the junk folder accordingly.

4. Limit Emailing Fatigued or Old Recipients

In the same way ISPs look at engagement, they also score the reputation of senders negatively based on how often they hit old, unresponsive or false inboxes. This is a sign of a ‘dirty’ list and irresponsible sending practices. If an ISP hasn’t seen a steady stream of good emails, a message will more than likely hit the junk folder or at the very least, throttle the sender down. The practical advice here is to stop emailing people who have not responded in several months. An old email list is a risk waiting to happen and could lower your reputation as a responsible email sender.

5. Write Clean Email Content

Many marketers often focus too much on their words and content when it comes to hoping to hit the inbox. Too much focus means changing words from “free” to “f.r.e.e.” This isn’t a wise or proven practice – and will hurt inbox placement. (These email marketing tips are better.) Write your emails for humans by making them to the point and look like a reputable email. To assess email content, try using a tool based on industry-accepted SpamAssassin as it will score an email based on the image-text ratio, links and thousands of additional criteria. Infusionsoft users get this technology built into their email editor, but a free solution is available for Windows users to test their email messages, too.

The only question on the minds of our readers is this: How can a marketer determine their inbox placement? The truth is, we’ve found inbox placement is less than reliable when performed en-masse. People’s customized spam filters determine whether an email lands in the inbox or not. However, a simple test is to create a few accounts on all the large ISPs (Google, AOL, Yahoo, Live) and send your email as a broadcast to these and look for where your messages arrive. If it makes it to the inbox, you can be assured that most people, by default, will receive your messages just fine.

These five tips will help improve inbox placement. It is entirely possible that someone’s spam filters are just cranked up too high. Encourage recipients to double-check their junk filters the first time you email them and to whitelist future messages to the inbox. Modern spam filters adapt to users and do their best to keep messages they want in the inbox and keep the rest out.

[Image credit: scfiasco]

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