by Sophie Daniline 
Email campaigns are a great way to connect with prospects, and nurture loyalty among current customers. But to do this, your emails need to be getting into prospects inboxes…. and that means keeping email deliverability rates high.
Here are four tips to keep your deliverability on the straight and narrow:
1. Segment, personalise and optimise
One of the key ways you can get your emails into a customers inbox is to ensure that the content you are sending is relevant and personalised to each individual.
Part of the way you can do this is through list segmentation. There are several ways you can segment your lists in Pardot, one of the best being dynamic lists.
In segmenting, you are making sure your emails are targeted to the right individuals. You may also want to include variable tags for key content.
By tracking how well your emails are doing using some key metrics, you can continuously optimise your campaigns.
In doing this, your emails are less likely to be marked as spam by recipients and therefore more likely to make it to the inbox.
2. Review your prospect data
Within Pardot you can use list segmentation to identify subscribers who haven’t opened your campaigns in a defined time period.
If you aren’t able to re-activate these people using a re-activation campaign then you may want to remove them from your mailing list.
Sending messages to inactive email accounts is a trigger for spam filters, so routinely cleaning your lists is highly recommended.
Running these frequently also has the added bonus of increasing your overall open rates over time.
3. Use branded links
Generic, short links (for example ‘bitly’ links) can be blacklisted. This will damage the deliverability of your emails.
Whenever adding links into an email, be sure to use a branded link. Branded links are created using your own domain (or your Pardot tracker domain), whereas generic short links use a domain that is accessible to anyone, and that includes spammers.
This is why generic, unbranded links are at risk of being blacklisted by email services.
Think about the email address you would use as your ‘from’ email or ‘sender name’? You wouldn’t make that generic, and the same policy applies with links.
4. Avoid key spam words
Certain words used in email campaigns can trigger email servers’ spam defenses. Prospect.io’s blog summarises 455 of the words and phrases you should be avoiding.
Some common offenders are:
- Win
- Free!
- Bargain
- Cash
- Consolidate debt and credit
Of course, context is key and, over the years, email providers have become much more skilled at detecting spam. So, while using one of these words in isolation is unlikely to land you in the spam bin, it’s worth sharing these with your marketing team.
One of my favourite tools for checking spammy copy is Email Copy Checker
Onwards…
These methods are not particularly time consuming or difficult to implement, and can make really positive improvements to your deliverability, so I’d recommend giving them a try.
They can also improve your customer experience, and help your marketing emails more impactful.
If this is your first email campaign, make sure you follow our guide for your first time send.