Email Marketing: How to get Whitelisted

From concept to coding, email marketing requires some considerable effort.

That’s why there’s no worse feeling than having your email ending up in the spam folder. To avoid this, you need to learn how to get whitelisted.

As email marketers, we’ve all experienced this disappointment. This is despite our best efforts to adhere to deliverability guidelines.

To avoid the spam folder, you need to learn how to get whitelisted.

If you’re not familiar with the term, whitelisting is when subscribers add your email to their address book. But why is it so important?

Whitelisting is a great way of letting ISPs know that subscribers value your emails. Moreover, it means the work you put into crafting your emails is less likely to be wasted.

There are two main ways you can go about getting a subscriber’s good books:

How to get Whitelisted:

1. The Traditional Way:

It seems bold, but being upfront with your subscribers ends well more often than not. Simply asking to be added to the address book is surprisingly effective.

The benefit of this approach is that after you ask, each subscriber can add your email address however their ISP requires. Without getting too into detail, you’ll be able to spur subscribers into action.

In fact, welcome emails have some of the best deliverability rates of any email format and you can leverage this to your advantage.

But even if they don’t add you to their address book on the first email, incorporating a brief reminder and instructions in the pre-header of your emails offers provides further opportunities for whitelisting.

Keep in mind, this method has drawbacks, namely that it requires subscribers to manually input your address. While it might not seem like a hurdle, it’s one more action your subscribers need to take and may not know exactly how to do.

2. The Custom:

Which brings us to the second option for being whitelisted: the “Custom” way.

The basis of a good customized whitelist request is building a dedicated page on your website. It describes the process and benefits of adding your email to the address book.

But don’t stop there. Use this page as an opportunity to educate visitors and show that your company is informed. By building your site’s authority, subscribers are more likely to trust the emails you send.

Place it on your thank you page. This page (like the welcome email) allows you leverage the increased engagement of new subscribers to your advantage.

Make the thank you page work for you by adding a link in your subsequent emails that direct back to it. Leaving a short reminder in your emails will allow subscribers plenty of opportunities to add you to their address book when the time is best for them.

Remember:

– After all this work to get whitelisted, don’t waste your efforts by sending terrible emails

– Being added to the address book is a sign of trust from your subscribers, trust you can’t afford to abuse

– Once you’ve been whitelisted, earn your place in the inbox with creative, compelling content that offers your subscribers something interesting

– Email marketing is always about your subscribers and what value you give them in exchange for access to their inbox

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