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How to Increase Your Email Deliverability and Avoid the “Spam” Folder

How to Increase Email Deliverability and Avoid Spam

 

To increase your email deliverability, you must first ensure that you are in compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act  (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing enacted in 2003). The guidelines in this law merely serve as the lowest common denominator and therefore you should always ensure that despite workarounds or loopholes, your emails should never be abusive in any way or construed as spam by the recipient.

First, it is important to note that not all types of emails are covered by CAN-SPAM act. For example, transactional emails are not covered, including password resets, new account creation messages, and e-commerce order confirmations. Transactional emails are very important so that your recipients can complete the intended process and interaction with the application and/or receive confirmation messages. In short, users expect these type of messages.  However, for marketing emails, it is important to instead obtain explicit opt-ins from from users. Note that, the penalty for violations can be up to $16,000/per email so think twice before blurring the lines.

In addition to the CAN-SPAM Act compliance guidelines, you should take some common sense and best practice steps to ensure that your emails do not end up in the Spam folder. First, let’s define spam. From an email sender perspective, spam email is any email message that an Internet Service Provider (ISP) filters into a spam folder instead of the recipient’s inbox. From the recipient’s perspective, spam is any unwanted and unsolicited email that finds its way to the recipient’s inbox. Here are tips and pointers to increase your deliverability and avoid the spam folder:

  1. Set up Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), Sender-ID, and domain keys. Surprisingly, this is the biggest offense; most businesses fail to configure this at all.
  2. Use an Email Delivery Service versus your host or your email client. Shared hosting and or hosting services, in general, may have IP Addresses that were used for spam and this will affect your deliverability.
  3. Ensure that you have express permission or explicit opt-in to email the recipient.
  4. Leverage permission marketing techniques. Taking this a step further, you may ask the recipient during subscription to be placed on their ‘whitelist’.
  5. Use spam checkers to test and check your emails before sending. Examples include Spam Assassin and isnotspam.com
  6. Avoid spam trigger words. These change and are the same words found in spam filters.
  7. If you are sending HTML emails, a good technique for avoiding spam filters is to include a text version of your email.
  8. Check and make sure you are not on any ‘blacklists’.  If you are, follow up with the website that added you and remove yourself. Some free services that you can use are:
    • Check Spam Database
    • Lookup Email Blacklist
    • Free Email Blacklist
  9. Do not send image only emails.  At a minimum maintain a good text to image ratio.
  10. Take measures to increase your open rates on the emails you send. This can include behavioral aspects, sending your emails at the right time, non-misleading subject lines, using fitting subject lines, segment and target your list appropriately, honor ‘unsubscribes’ in a timely manner, and keep your list fresh.
  11. Avoid catch-all domain spam. These are common email addresses that spammers normally target and are likely to be blocked by filters and other applications.
  12. Role-based email addresses go to distribution lists which go to more than one person.  It’s not likely that every person on the distribution list gave permission to receive your email and as a result, these emails tend to produce a large number of spam complaints. It is best to exclude marketing emails to role-based email addresses.  To be proactive, include validation rules to your online registration pages and filters that prevent the distribution of emails to role-based email addresses. Below find a list of email addresses that you can add to validation and filters:  info@, contact@, office@, admin@, sales@, team@, abuse@ e.t.c

 

Are you CAN-SPAM compliant?  Looking to produce a spam-free, high-converting email marketing campaign?  Contact us today at Blue Nile Digital Marketing.  We’re here to help!

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Why You are Mismanaging Your PPC Efforts:

PPC Management by Blue Nile Digital Marketing Denver

How to Optimize, by Blue Nile Digital Marketing, a top Denver PPC Management agency

 

In today’s increasingly competitive digital world, Paid Search Advertising (also referred to as PPC, ‘pay-per-click’, or CPC, ‘cost-per-click’) can make or break a business’ digital marketing strategy.  Other strategies can take time, but PPC ensures: the ideal audience is reached, it is reached before your competition (and immediately), and you never pay unless someone actually clicks your offer.  What’s better than that?

 

Pay-Per-Click: What it is and how it works

There is no one-size fits all approach when it comes to Internet marketing. Each business’ approach will vary depending on its needs and budget, although there are certain fundamentals that should be integrated into every strategy. PPC is one of them, but for businesses that don’t have the time, outsourcing PPC management is a viable option.

PPC, which stands for pay-per-click, is a kind of Internet marketing where advertisers or business owners pay a fee for every click-through their ads get online. PPC is an effective way of enabling customers to find your website as opposed to organic visits, which can take some time.

 

Google AdWords Explained

Google AdWords is the most popular PPC platform in the world. Through AdWords, businesses can create ads that will appear on the Google search engine as well as other Google-owned sites. AdWords works by having users bid on a keyword, then they pay for each time a user clicks on their ads. Whenever a user makes a search using the keyword they bid on, Google pools together all AdWords advertisers using the same keyword then chooses a set that will appear on the highly-coveted ad space atop the search results page (where over 90% of clicks take place).

Finding the right mix of Google AdWords that won’t eat into your budget can be tricky, which is where working with PPC management experts can help.

 

Facebook Marketing

Another essential element of any digital strategy is Facebook Marketing. The world’s most popular social media site is also an extremely effective marketing tool. With over 1.2 billion active users, 62% of whom login every day, it’s important to have Facebook Marketing tactics as part of your online marketing.

 

There are several ways to market your business on Facebook:

Pages: Facebook pages are profiles of businesses and organizations on the site. When users like a business page, this enables them to receive updates from the page in their news feed. The best part of all is that Facebook Pages are free, and relatively quick to setup.

Ads: Out of all the online platforms, Facebook’s advertising platform is highest-targeted, enabling advertisers to select whom their ads will appear to based on location, interests, education levels, ages, and even the kind of device being used for browsing. The powerful targeting parameters of Facebook make it extremely useful for online advertising. Additionally, Facebook lets you set a budget for your advertising campaigns (although in some cases the ads can be expensive and time-consuming to set up or monitor; hence, engaging an agency).

Groups: Facebook groups act as discussion forums, but are also built with added features that both profiles and Pages may not have. Businesses can use groups for advertising by creating and participating in groups that are relevant to your product, service, or industry as a means of reaching potential customers. Groups are free, but interaction may be time consuming.

 

PPC = High ROI

Most businesses associate PPC advertising with high marketing expenses, since you’ll have to pay for each click that the search campaign has delivered to your site. Professionally setting up a PPC campaign is a very effective way to advertise online, and with the help of PPC management experts, it can even increase your marketing ROI.

Other search engine optimization campaigns can often take months to give you results, but with PPC, traffic is driven to your website immediately. Any business can start a Google AdWords campaign, choose some keywords, and receive clicks in a matter of hours. On the other hand, organic traffic will require more time and effort in the form of content marketing and link building, but PPC will enable you to receive clicks right away.

PPC is extremely measurable, providing you with the opportunity to analyze every single aspect of the campaign. Through the data, you can isolate which factors the campaign is performing well in, and which aspects need help. You’ll be able to see which ads are receiving the most impressions and clicks; and which clicks converted.  This is another aspect that makes working with a PPC management agency’s experts attractive: ultimate accountability.

These are just some of the reasons why PPC will give you a better ROI than most marketing campaigns.

 

Case Studies

At Blue Nile Digital Marketing, we’ve seen firsthand how PPC has generated a higher ROI for our clients. In Denver, a real estate law firm invested $8,000/month in PPC campaigns. That can sound like a large investment, but the PPC ads resulted in over $36,000 additional monthly revenue because the real estate law firm gained three new clients (a net of $28,000 in revenue). If the law firm didn’t invest in PPC ads, it would have cost them around $12-18,000/month in lost business that instead went to their competitor (i.e. taking a hit to business twice over).

 

Benefits of Investing in PPC

Investing part of your marketing budget in Paid Search and PPC ads can mean the difference between operating losses, and attracting new business. Keep in mind that people are already searching for the product or services that you are offering, but without the right PPC tactics in place they won’t be able to find you (or worse, they’ll find your competition first). Remember the “90% Rule”: 90% of searches start on a search engine, and almost 90% of internet searchers only look on the first page, then click on the first few links.  Are you there?  Is your competition?

 

Let Blue Nile handle your PPC management efforts to avoid costly mistakes with AdWords and losing customers to competition.  Contact us today!

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Use this quick SEO checklist to improve your content optimization quests

 

The fact is: content is a lame king without good SEO!

 

The buzz phrases can change from year to year, but search engine optimization is here to stay (forever).  No surprise there.

From big corporations to mom’n’pop corner stores, due to today’s technology, everyone is documenting; generating content in all forms across many platforms. Tons of content is uploaded to the Internet every day. And yet, it so often gets lost midway, somewhere.

How?

One of the most common ways to kill the effectiveness of rich content is by simply overlooking (or worse, discounting) the search engine optimization aspect of it. Unfortunately, most copywriters and digital marketing agencies tend to do just this.

It is essential to optimize your content for search engine algorithms, ‘bots’, and ‘crawlers’ if you want it to reach your target audience organically (and as efficiently as possible).

No, I am not talking about keyword specific writing.  Though, I would never understate the significance of it.  This article focuses on other strategic aspects of content optimization that cry for attention from bloggers and copywriters.

So without further ado, let me bring up a quick checklist you can use to audit your content. Rest assured, if you have most of these checked; you certainly will rank better than before.

Title:

    • Always use an H1 tag for your titles.
    • Your target keyword must appear in the title; earlier is better.
    • Preferably, start your titles with a verb (e.g. fix, use, start, improve, learn, etc.) Verbs act as natural calls to action.

URL:

  • KISS (“Keep it simple, stupid.”) your URL. No special characters, please.
  • Keep it short too. Here is an example of an unnecessarily long URL:

https://blueniledm.com/use -this -quick -SEO- checklist -to- improve- your- content -marketing –quests

Instead, make it:

https://blueniledm.com/seo-checklist-for-content-marketing

If using WordPress, it will most likely auto-generate the former URL. Most of us forget to tweak it to something like the latter!

  • Add modifiers (e.g. best, top, guide, date, etc.) for improved optimization.

Example:

https://blueniledm.com/best-seo-checklist-for-content-marketing

or

https://blueniledm.com/seo-checklist-for-content-marketing-2017

Meta tags:

  • Your meta title is the first thing that search engines will read. It ought to have your target keyword in it.
  • You can have (if necessary) a separate title for your content (often referred to as ‘click bait’) and a separate, more search-friendly title in the meta title.
  • Meta descriptions are important; do not miss these. Feel free to add your long tail keyword in your description.

Subheads:

  • Use H2 tags for subheads
  • At least one of your subheads should include your target keyword. If you are using long tail keywords, they should invariably make part of one of the subheads.

Images:

  • Make sure one of the image file names includes your target keyword. For this article, I named the image on the top to be ‘SEO techniques for content optimization.png’
  • Do not forget the importance of Alt tags!
  • Image Optimizer and Optimizilla are some fantastic image optimization tools that you can use to get perfectly optimized images.

Links:

  • Relevant outbound links aid search engines in figuring out what your content carries. It helps your content gain authority and relevance.
  • Produce internal linking to other related pages of your website or blog. This improves navigation and distributes ‘page rank’ evenly throughout the website.

Responsive:

  • The blog or website you plan to publish your content on should be responsive to all kind of devices like smartphones, tablets, and PCs alike. Google penalizesplatforms that aren’t mobile-friendly.

Social icons:

  • Place social media icons prominently on your website’s pages. Though social shares are often ‘no follow’ links, search engines do count them as ‘trust votes’ (i.e. signals of website safety, relevance, authority, and more).

 

There is a lot that goes into producing great content, above and beyond developing creative and inspiring material. Do not devalue your masterpiece by disregarding the SEO component.  It does not matter how great your content is if your target audience cannot find it.

Don’t believe me?  Temporarily shut down your live blogs and optimize them per the above checklist. You will see the difference yourself.

Otherwise, if you are about to start a new blog or piece of content, then please use the techniques above. Making your content SEO-friendly makes it more readable and comprehensible to search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.  This means higher rankings in SERPs (search engine results pages).

When you rank better, you reach better.  Better reach means more traffic; more traffic can ultimately mean more conversions!  Isn’t that what your business’ digital marketing strategy is all about?

 

If you are stuck anywhere in your digital marketing endeavors, contact us today. Our team of digital marketing gurus is ready to help you in every way possible.

You are welcome to send us an email as well; we love reading too!

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Digital is the DNA we possess! Integrity, Focus, and Results are the pillars we stand on!

 

Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing

Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.”

–Michael Jordan

 

We are a bunch of technology enthusiasts. Playing with the latest technological tools is our favorite sport. And, making sense (and cents!) out of it is our collective passion.

With more than a few Fortune 500 companies as our clientele via consulting, business development, and technology implementation and deployment; each of us has more than a decade-long story of learning, unlearning, and relearning new skills and achieving expertise.

En route, we learned that actions make sense only when they deliver.

With that mantra, we tenured technologists and decorated business developers banded together and launched Blue Nile in late 2016; an initiative into digital marketing. Why digital marketing? Because it is a perfect ensemble of technology and creativity! Just like our team 🙂

Digital marketing is one of the technology niches that is progressing and maturing much faster than expected. You need to be on the bleeding edge; learn fast, and implement faster. What is even cooler, your actions are measurable. That means it is easy to evaluate what is working and what is not.

On the downside, digital marketing and advertising is turning chaotic and sometimes baffling. Most digital marketing agencies employ a generic approach to the needs of enterprises coming from different industries and of varying sizes. In the end, organizations end up exhausting their Internet marketing budget while achieving less than humble ROI.

At Blue Nile, we believe that using the correct technology mix is one of the key differentiators that make champions, champions! Therefore, we curate exclusive digital marketing solutions for each of our clients depending on the quantified goals they aim to achieve. The evident outcome of it is better conversions at a lower cost.

We are a full-service digital marketing and advertising firm, duly associated with brands that display eminence and trust. We help our clients through all the aspects of building, branding, and maintaining a robust digital landscape that can readily outperform any current or potential competition.

To ensure a deep and lasting relationship, we hand-pick a few clients every year and give them the best of us in terms of design, strategy, implementation, and supervision. We reject being ‘just another agency’ offering services to their clients. Instead, we aspire to be the growth partners of those who trust us. Each of our solutions is thoroughly brainstormed, well researched, and oozes creative thinking, innovation, and diligence.

We know the difference of moving and progressing. When you progress, we progress. When you stand taller, we feel stronger. When you achieve, we love it!

If you are equally passionate like us and are determined to take your organization to the next level, contact us today! We are eager to hear from you and design the solution to every challenge that you encounter on your way to achieving success.

– The Blue Nile Team

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