Working on an email campaign? Use mailchimp? Not seeing results ? Maybe its because your emails are going to spam or promotions. Here are some small things you can do to get your email mailing list in front of your audience.
5 Ways to get e-mails to enter the inbox
- Plan, Plan, Plan
There are a number of ways you can personalize your newsletters. You can add pictures, fonts, create a header, etc. Write the newsletter you want and when you are ready, you can, and should, begin test sending your email. This is when you can find out if your newsletter is being sent to the promotions or spam folders. There is a limit to how many test emails you can send, so remember to create replicas as you test your newsletter! The promotions tab on gmail.com is especially tricky. As you test the newsletter, sometimes the emails would go to the promotions tab for one email but not the other. This was especially tricky and frustrating to constantly test.
2. Have contributors subscribe to your gmail directly
Remember, on gmail.com, you can subscribe to people on your contact list, so remember to remind your audience to subscribe to you. This will make sure your newsletters are never sent to the promotions or spam folder.
3. Put your images and emojis in the right location.
As you work with MailChimp you will have text boxes and image boxes. This might seem obvious, but do not put images in the text box! This is important because you may accidentally put an emoji or image in a text box, such as what I did my first time using it. Putting emojis in a textbox makes the email seem as if it is a promotion. Would you send an email to someone using emojis? Maybe, but usually you don’t. As for images, I wanted a very small image for my newsletter, so I simply put the image in the text box above the paragraph I wanted it to be above. This was a mistake. After I had done this, I test sent the email, and it was immediately sent to my promotions box. The best practice to use would be to make a new text box or new image box for every new paragraph or image you want to include. This means if you want to put an image, then a passage on that image and then another image, it would require an image box, a text box, and then another image box. So remember, images are always in image boxes and text is always in text boxes or else your newsletter will be sent to the promotions or spam.
4. Don’t put too many fonts and different sized fonts in your main body of your email promotion.
Putting multiple fonts and with different sizes is a risk. While working on a newsletter, I practiced putting different fonts with different sizes throughout the email. I was being really creative with it, but after I test sent it, it was sent to the promotions box. I had to think to myself, would I really be putting this many different fonts with different sizes in and ordinary email? This is the question that has to stay in your head while working with sites like MailChimp. Bolding or underlining seemed to be okay, therefore I suggest you to bold or underline if you want to emphasize something in your newsletter. A few different fonts shouldn’t hurt though.
5. Multiple Videos
This one is more of a cool tip I found while working on MailChimp. While working, I was able to embed more than just one video into my newsletter. This was a surprise, because we usually don’t attach multiple videos to our emails. Most emails people send each other do not even include a video, however I put our company’s YouTube video at the bottom of the newsletter and it worked perfectly. Surprised, I added another video and tested it. The newsletter was still sent to the primary tab, and I continued testing until I got to three videos and every test was sent to the inbox folder. I suspected emails wouldn’t ever need to attach more than three videos, therefore I stopped my test emails after three.
Sparknotes
Remember: always test send your email to multiple contacts, do not put emojis or images in text boxes, and do not overdo the size and the number of fonts you use. Also, do not forget to edit both the desktop and mobile designs of the newsletter! Good luck and happy mailchimp !
