How to avoid sending low quality content messages?

To send high performing messages you need to avoid sending low-quality content. It’s important to send content your subscribers expect to receive. If they subscribe to receive tips on photography, send them only such content.

There are also some general quality guidelines you should follow to achieve message high performance.

Quality guidelines:

• Avoid adding FWD, RE in your subject lines because inboxes typically consider them as spam.
• Don’t include words or phrases commonly associated with spam, such as: make $, money, fast, income, cash, billion, cheap.
• Make sure your content doesn’t violate our Terms of Service.
• Check the spam check results for each message and improve your content accordingly.
• Take care of your sender reputation. Email your subscribers as often as they want to be emailed. Learn more about email frequency from our 25 Email Marketing Best Practices That Drive Results blog post.
• Avoid sending to inactive contacts. It’s a good practice to check contact engagement score.
• Avoid using templates shared by other users where the HTML and phrases or sentences are the same.
• Use modern templates that have good fonts and add formatting to your message to keep the HTML of the message fresh.
• Remember not to overload your messages with images. Don’t base your message on a single image that replaces your message content.
• Remember to keep balance between the link to text ratio. Avoid situations where most of the message includes links.
• Keep the number of redirects or dynamic content minimal when adding a link.
• Avoid using link shorteners. The best solution is to hyperlink text or a button in your message. If you do use link shorteners, check if the domain provided by them isn’t blacklisted. You can check if the domain is blacklisted here and here.
• Custom domain from address, links pointing to the same domain, message headers should point to your domain, your sender domain should be signed with DKIM. The more alignment there is between the sender domain and the message, the better, as it becomes more reliable for the ISPs (Inbox Service Providers).
• Make sure your message HTML code is correct and doesn’t contain invalid elements.
• Be mindful of the contrast between your text and background.  When the contrast is too low, some ISPs (Inbox Service Providers) can block the message as they assume it’s an attempt to hide something from the reader.
• Don’t use too many and too big white spaces in your email.
• Avoid Hushbusters. These are blocks of text that are invisible to recipients. They are used in the mail structure to deceive the filters.

What may happen if my message content quality isn’t good? 

If you consistently send low-quality email content, your emails may start landing in spam. They may even not be delivered at all because they’ll get rejected by the server-side filters.

Low-quality emails will also affect your reputation as a sender. The lower the reputation, the harder it is to reach your recipients’ inboxes.

We recommend you follow the quality guidelines to create engaging emails that both entice your audience and are accepted by the ISPs. 

You can also view our recent blog post on 12 reasons why your emails go to spam and how to to handle it. We also recommend our Help Center articles on why emails sometimes end up in a spam folder and what are the best email practices that influence delivery.