29 Tips for Getting Emails Past Spam Filters

3 TIPS FOR GETTING YOUR EMAILS PAST SPAM FILTERS: Email spam filters are becoming more sophisticated and each email client (Gmail, Outlook, iOS, Yahoo!, etc) has a different formula for separating relevant email from spam email. Chances are, that email with eye-catching copy and a perfectly branded template may not even reach your contact’s inbox altogether! This sounds simple, but getting the best ROI on your email marketing efforts requires that your emails be successfully delivered in the first place. HubSpot outlines 29 email deliverability tips, but here are 3 crucial ones we picked:

1. Don’t scrape sites for email addresses or purchase lists of contacts who aren’t familiar with your brand: If these contacts haven’t opted-in to receiving your emails, there’s a greater chance they’ll mark you as spam.
2. Don’t email people who have bounced repeatedly: If you continuously send emails to contacts that have bounced, your email sender reputation will be poor and deliverability will plummet.
3. Don’t use exclamation points or all caps: 69% of email recipients report email as spam based solely on the subject line. Using exclamation points and all caps in your subject lines will get flagged by spam filters and email recipients.

Why you should care: Email marketing is overused and abused, however, it's still one of the best ways to communicate with prospective students. Yet, many admissions teams (and even some marketing agencies) don’t fully understand the major keys to email deliverability. The most optimized emails are a result of a healthy balance between attention-grabbing copy, technical templating, and maintaining engaged student prospects. Even traditional higher education “comm flows” need professional revision to bypass modern email spam filters. 

FACEBOOK IMPROVES TRANSPARENCY ON AD TARGETING: Facebook recently faced a $5 billion dollar lawsuit handed down by the FTC for a number of user privacy violations. Now, Facebook is slowly cleaning up its act, and this includes greater transparency into how businesses are using your information. As a Facebook user, it’s now easier than ever to update your preferences so that you don’t get irrelevant advertisements. When you click “Why am I seeing this ad?”, you’ll gain visibility into exactly why you were shown that particular ad including your interests, a past website you visited, a post you liked or even your demographics that match you to a specific ad. In sum, users will be able to more easily change their preferences to block the ads that they don’t want to see.

Why you should care: It’s now easier than ever for Facebook users to update their private information and change the ads they see, and this might actually be a good thing for enrollment teams advertising on Facebook. Instead of ads and ad dollars going to prospective students who are uninterested in your programs, these prospects will now have the ability to more easily update preferences, like interests, likes, or demographics, so that the ads they do receive have content they’re truly interested in and will engage with.

HAVE YOU CONSIDERED THESE 4 KEYWORD RESEARCH STRATEGIES: Keyword research is crucial to improving SEO, but also imperative to consider before introducing a new product, moving into a new market, or even writing a new piece of content. One of the more common keyword research strategies is to “mine” the internet for top questions and answers. This means looking at common search queries and figuring out the kinds of questions people are asking so that you can step in with a timely, valuable answer. Another research strategy is looking at customer reviews. Look at similar products and services to the ones you offer. If customers are complaining about a competitor, there’s a golden opportunity to turn that complaint into a valuable offering. Additionally, you can look at social media mentions of certain keywords, competitors, or even your own business to see what people have to say and frame new content around that information. Lastly, you can use conventional SEO tools, like Moz and SEMrush, that will suggest keywords based on high search volume and ranking difficulty.

Why you should care: Higher education institutions need to repeatedly perform these 4 keyword research strategies in order to stay atop of students’ interests, pain points, and common questions. Admissions teams who can more accurately answer the questions or queries of prospective students will have greater ease in converting them into enrolled students. Look to gathering keyword data from more than just Google. Try using social media mentions, college review sites, and SEO tools. These can all help you craft content that provides valuable answers to students’ questions. It could even help in the naming of a new degree program!

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