Email is a great way to boost customer review return rates and so it’s not surprising that it’s one of the most popular methods used by retailers. However, your email review requests are useless if they don’t receive your recipient. Email deliverability is a huge issue and one that retailers should be fully aware of.
Several factors impact the deliverability of email review requests. These include:
- Automatic spam checking algorithms – by internet and mail service providers.
- Customer reported spam – they think it’s inappropriate or marketing related.
- Bounced emails – usually due to an incorrect email address or other restriction.
Spam is bad for collecting product reviews
This may come as a surprise, but a number of review requests don’t make it into your customer’s inbox and spam is the main reason. Not because the email is spam, but because it looks like spam to a computer program or an algorithm, and a review request in the spam box usually means no product review.
But what about email delivery rates? Statistics on email delivery rate are next to useless and provide little valuable insight into whether you’ve got the right ingredients to collect the most reviews possible. Sure the email was delivered, but to which folder? Inbox or spam?
How bad is spam?
Spam is one of the biggest threats to legitimate business emails – nearly 85% of all emails are spam. There are signs that email spam volumes have dropped slightly, however. Between June 2020 and January 2021, the average daily spam volume dropped from 316.39 billion to just over 122 billion – still a staggering figure by any measure.
It’s no wonder that internet and mail service providers are waging an endless war on spam with stringent and intelligent algorithms. It’s not an exact science, and at times legitimate transactional emails, such as product review requests, are sent straight to the spam folder.
Working together we can both minimise the spam tagging risk and improve inbox deliverability and in turn email open rates – one of the best metrics to measure email review request performance.
HelpfulCrowd’s role – Senders Reputation Score
Spam filters look at HelpfulCrowds sending reputation score. This is one of the most important metrics used by ISPs to try and determine whether the email is good or bad. At HelpfulCrowd we frequently monitor this score and continually look for ways to improve our already fantastic sending reputation rating.
Product review request email content
Spam filters also analyze email content. This means that anything you write in a product review request could send your request to the spam folder.
Full creative and editorial freedom of the email templates is a great thing, however, you should limit the use of risky words and characters in both the subject line as well as body. This ultimate list of email spam trigger words can help you avoid heading for the junk folder, but these words, punctuation marks and formats are to be handled with caution;
- free
- buy
- prize
- promo
- !!!
- ALL CAPS
You should also ensure that your email review requests are not misleading, deceptive, or misuse random characters as this increases the risk of a customer reporting an email as spam.
What about bounced emails?
Bounced emails are another reason that the customer will not receive an email request. If you have bounced review requests, it is best to try and contact the customer through another means to check the email address. The problem might not be with the email address, but with the mail provider and the customer may just thank you for bringing it to their attention.
Summary
There are many factors that affect inbox deliverability. Some of those are out of our control but a great many are within our hands – both yours and ours. Try HelpfulCrowd today and benefit from a range of spam-busting resources and inbox-friendly email review request templates.
Remember some of the tips in this post while reviewing your email templates. They can significantly increase your inbox delivery rates and lead to many more reviews.
Happy collecting!
