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While getting a celebrity to hawk your product or service is a surefire way to get a ton of people to see it, most marketers can’t afford to partner with influencers who have millions of followers.

Luckily, recent research has good news for marketers whose budgets don’t allow for A-list influencer endorsements. According to this new finding, it may just take a handful of lesser-known but strategically connected influencers talking about your brand to help its popularity soar.

Intrigued? Let’s dive into the research in more detail …

How the Majority Illusion Gives the Appearance Popularity

A team of researchers led by Kristina Lerman at USC recently uncovered a social media phenomenon known as the majority illusion, which happens when certain members within a social network give the appearance that an idea, opinion, or product is more popular than it is. The majority illusion may explain why some people are susceptible to adopting unpopular opinions or how an entire movement can spread seemingly overnight.

The researchers’ findings have big implications for marketers because creating an illusion of popularity may be enough to actually make something become popular.

So how does the majority illusion happen?

Image Credit: HBR

In the illustration above, the red nodes represent members of a network who share some common attribute — such as men with beards. Although both of these networks have the same structure, the red nodes are positioned differently.

This diagram illustrates how several well-connected individuals can skew the network’s perceptions. In the diagram on the left, a large percentage of the network will observe that people in their network have beards, making this attribute appear more common than it is.  

Meanwhile, in the diagram on the right, the people with beards are less connected, so members of the group won’t perceive an abundance of bearded men in their network. Looking at these two examples, we might assume that people in the group on the left may be more likely to start growing beards, since it appears to be a popular trend in their social network.

Now that we’ve gotten the complicated science out of the way, let’s look at what the majority illusion means for your influencer marketing strategy.

How to Leverage the Majority Illusion for Influencer Marketing

According to the research, two types of influencers are most likely to create the majority illusion — and both are good for achieving different types of goals.

Work With Niche Influencers for Action-Based Goals

If your influencer marketing strategy aims to achieve conversion-based goals, such as getting people to sign up for a free trial or buy your product, partnering with niche influencers may yield the best results.

Niche influencers with smaller but highly engaged audiences may not be your top-of-mind choice, but there are many benefits to working with influencers in niche communities as opposed to influencers with massive followings. For one, it turns out niche influencers may be the best choice for creating the majority illusion and moving their audience to take action.

The research found the majority illusion is most likely to happen in social networks where individual members with a low number of connections are connected to individuals with a high number of connections, which are group dynamics likely to occur in niche communities with a handful of popular members. Highly connected members of these tightly knit groups, or niche influencers, wield significant influence within their network. Less popular members of the group may be easily influenced since they are less exposed to outside ideas and opinions.

But the benefits don’t end there. Niche influencers are typically more accessible than A-list influencers, meaning they’re easier to partner with. They have closer relationships with their audiences, and they are more influential within their circles. Furthermore, through niche influencers you can reach audiences who are further down the buying cycle, such as in the consideration stage. When your brand’s niche closely aligns with the influencer’s niche, there’s a good chance they have an audience that is highly educated about your industry.

To find niche influencers, look for influencers whose followers are similar to them and have a small number of connections. For more help with identifying the right niche influencers, check out our guide to finding effective influencers.

Work With Strategically Positioned Influencers for Awareness-Based Goals

If you want your influencer marketing efforts to reach the widest possible audience, look for influencers who have cross-vertical appeal. Influencers positioned between several different communities are best for getting your message broadcasted to a range of different audiences.

To see this strategic positioning in action, we mapped out an interactive network graph of 77 influential voices on Twitter. In the below screenshot from the graph, you can see how Ann Handley — aka @MarketingProfs — has connections across several different industries, each represented by different colors. Each node represents an individual, and the lines represent connections between members. While Handley doesn’t have the most followers out of all the influencers in our network model, she certainly has a strategic position.

To identify influencers with this strategic positioning (without building your own network model), look for influencers who are followed by people across multiple verticals and followed by other influencers.

Remember: Influencers with the most followers aren’t necessarily the most influential. However, enlisting the help of just one or two niche or strategically placed influencers at a time may not make an impact. Timing is crucial. The more influencers you can get pushing your message at the same time, the better your chances for creating the majority illusion. 

As an Inbound Marketer, driving targeted traffic and leads to your website should always be your primary goal. Whether you’re improving your content for SEO, tweaking your Adwords copy to boost click throughs, or testing messaging in social media updates, every incremental gain in traffic and leads matters.

That’s why it’s so critical to ensure that your website meets these widely accepted accessibility standards. By maximizing your accessibility, not only will you be ensuring your website can be viewed by the largest audience possible but you’ll also be providing a better overall user experience for each of your visitors.

That said, when you’re focus on driving inbound marketing results evaluating your website for accessibility can seem like a daunting or unnecessary task at first glance.

Region dependent accessibility legislation can further complicate this matter – different countries may have their own preferred accessibility standards. However, by focusing on four core areas—text contrast, form structure, image tags, and navigational pathfinding—you’ll improve the overall accessibility of your site and nurture inbound and design best practices at the same time.

In this article, we will take a closer look at these four core areas. 

Along the way, we will offers tips on how to maximize the accessibility of your website. We’ll also provide you with a collection of helpful tools that can ensure your website is meeting the lofty accessibility standards you have set for it.

Before we get started, every year we dig into the latest research, trends and opportunities in the field of inbound marketing. If you’d like to brush up on your current knowledge of inbound marketing download a free copy of our recently released 2016 Edition of the Executive’s Guide to Inbound Marketing. The 40+ page document is packed with actionable insight to help you accelerate your inbound marketing results.

Without further ado, let’s go over the four basic website accessibility tests every inbound marketer should be aware of.

1) Contrast

You put a lot of time and thought into writing great copy, so why risk it not being accessible to a portion of the visitors to your site? Ensuring that your text content is readable for your entire audience by checking its contrast can improve the overall accessibility of your website and could even help drive down your bounce rate.

Similar to how contrast can be used to allow a CTA to really “pop”, it’s important that the contrast ratios of text and background pairings facilitate ease of readability. Generally speaking, the following standards should be met:

Small Text (less than 18 point, or 14 point point bold) – Minimum ratio of 4.5:1
Large Text (18 point or 14 point bold) – Minimum ratio of 3:1

Strictly speaking, these minimums are borrowed from a set of web accessibility guidelines called Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) but similar guidelines are common to ISO and ANSI standards.

While the example above is a bit exaggerated, it clearly demonstrates how a less than ideal contrast ratio can impact the readability of your content. Ensuring that the ratio between your text and its background meets these minimums will help improve your website user experience, especially for those visitors with low colour vision.

While a variety of semi-automated tools exist for checking contrast, they can often get tripped up when checking text placed over a background image. As a result, doing a manual check using a tool like Colour Contrast Analyzer is often the best approach. Remember, page copy is not the only element that should be evaluated. By checking CTAs, menus, tooltips and forms, you will support the best possible user experience.

2) Images

Like copy, you depend on the images within your sites to convey a tremendous amount of information, so it’s critical that visual site content be accessible to all traffic.

Visitors to a site with a visual impairment may be reliant on assistive technologies such as screen readers which convert content to audio descriptions and cues. If an image is added to the site “as-is”, they will be ignored by these types of technologies and you risk subjecting that segment of traffic to a less than ideal experience.

So how can you prevent this from happening?

Tagging images within your site with a particular type of notation called “alt text” allows assistive technologies to parse images within your page. This ensures your content can be consumed by the widest possible audience.

Review the two images above. While they are both images of an apple, they are not entirely the same. If you inspect the underlying code for each image, you’ll discover the one on the left contains alt text that describes its content. This simple addition makes a tremendous difference to users relying on screen readers:

When evaluating your image content there are two further things to keep in mind (per W3):

• Avoid using images of text, for example, an image of a word. While alt text can be used to enhance the accessibility of this content it is often better conveyed as some form of text.
• If you’re confident that a given image is purely decorative, use a null alt text attribute to allow screen readers to ignore the content.

You can easily identify missing or poor alt text on your website by using the Wave Toolbar.

Taking the time to effectively include alt text tags has an added benefit beyond addressing accessibility. Search engines employe automated tools called spiders which index the content of your site. These tools can easily parse the images within your page, ensuring your page is ranked based on the full value of its content.

3) Forms

The use of forms in websites, with an inbound marketing focus or otherwise, is ubiquitous. Ideally, the data you collect through the use of forms will be accurate and complete, especially when that form information is being used in the context of e-commerce or in generating inbound leads.

You may think that the accessibility of forms would add another layer of complication, but the opposite is true. In fact, ensuring forms follow accessibility guidelines actually works to improve the quality of data you’re collecting and should encourage completion rates.

Let’s look at three ways to address form accessibility:

Labels

Ensuring all forms within your site have a label element allows visitors using assistive technologies to identify the purpose of the form prior to providing input. Without a label element, the intent of a given form could be lost or misunderstood by a segment of your traffic. This technique can be taken a step further by including an example of the data a field is requesting (ex. MM-DD-YYYY) within the label itself.

Instructions

Providing instructions for forms can be addressed in a number of different ways besides the form label. The two further common methods would be the use of a placeholder tag with associated placeholder text, or adding instructions in the page itself. These form instructions can be linked to single form element or a group of inputs depending on the the information being requested.

Error correction/validation

Although it may not be suitable for all form types, validation or error correction can provide one last safeguard against incorrect or invalid data being submitted by a visitor to your site.

On a text entry field for an e-mail address, you can verify the address a visitor provides meets a basic set of criteria before accepting it (for example, does it contain an “@” symbol). Taking the email example a step further, free API’s can be leveraged which provide rich feedback for a wide set of error conditions like common email domain misspellings.

More broadly, required field should also have a means of drawing attention to themselves if left empty. Effectively using highlights and alerts will ensure no form is abandoned before submission.

Once again, the Wave Toolbar is an excellent tool for reviewing form accessibility on your website.

It is important to note that you do not necessarily need to implement every one of these strategies for every form – improving accessibility should not hinder the overall usability of the page. Conversely, excessive or incorrect use of these approaches can cause further accessibility problems. For example, adding multiple or conflicting form labels will cause more harm than good.

Frequently, the most critical functions of websites depend on form data – implementation of these basic accessibility strategies will help all visitors complete them.

4) Navigation

Implementation of well thought out site navigation and location cues is an exercise that serves many masters. Effective execution of this design element can have a positive effect on SEO, general usability and adherence to accessibility best practices. Similar to the other accessibility areas discussed previously, you do not want to hide great content behind unclear navigation.

Staying with the theme of easy wins, let’s review three aspects of navigation that can have a substantial positive impact on your site:

Multiple Ways to Navigate

While it is often overlooked, there should be multiple paths for users to browse to any given page. Where possible, inclusion of a search mechanism will ensure that pages at all levels of your site can be accessed with a minimum number of required actions from users. Further supporting the idea of minimizing impediments to content is the implementation of a sitemap, which offers a simplified representation of your site architecture to those who need it. Last, the use of breadcrumbs (as shown below) can support two goals. 

First of all, navigation breadcrumbs provide a supplementary means of accessing content, while indicating to the user where they are currently located with respect to the site structure.

Location is Always Clear

A user should never feel lost while browsing your site and great design can go a long way to support this goal. As noted previously, breadcrumbs are a common solution to this problem as they address multiple accessibility concerns and require minimal effort to implement. Existing menu elements can also be updated to provide navigational cues by highlighting the current location (page and sub-section) of the user with respect to the site layout as seen in the example below: 

Now that you’ve put the time into an effective menu, search and breadcrumbs, you need to make sure that they are consistently displayed from page to page.

Consistent Navigation

Assume for a moment that a user is visiting you site for the first time and is searching for information, starting at its homepage. They briefly assess the menus available then navigate to where they believe they will find the content they came for. If they don’t find the information they wanted, or they require further information, what is their next step?

Ideally, they should be able to refer back to their previous navigational assumptions and continue without returning to the homepage. In this scenario— and to support an overall accessible design—it is imperative that the location and behaviour of your site’s navigational elements are predictable from page to page.

Beyond removing hurdles between users and your site content, navigational design elements like sitemaps, breadcrumbs and search provide additional avenues through which your site sub-pages can be found and indexed by search engines.

In Closing

By focusing on and addressing these oft-overlooked accessibility problems, you can confidently lay the foundation for a fully accessible website. In doing so, you can improve the overall user experience of visitors to your website, resulting in an increase of traffic, leads, and—most importantly—customers.

Marketers spend a lot of time drafting poignant email copy, designing wonderfully branded email templates, and crafting succinct and enticing email subject lines that get open and click-through rates skyrocketing.

But before hitting send, have you considered whether your subscribers will even get the opportunity to read your email?

No matter how legitimate of an email marketer you are, there are a host of things you may not even know about that can prevent your email from ever reaching someone’s inbox. With more stringent laws and increasingly sophisticated spam filters, it’s to your benefit to know everything that can affect your email’s deliverability.

If steering clear of legal trouble isn’t enough to convince you, squeezing more ROI out of your email marketing efforts certainly should. Take a look at the things you should absolutely never do in your email marketing if you want your messages to be successfully delivered, and the things you can proactively do to increase your rate of email deliverability. (Take HubSpot’s free email marketing certification course to learn even more about email marketing best practices.)

29 Ways to Avoid Sending Spam Email & Improve Your Email Deliverability

What You Should Never Do

1) Don’t buy or rent email lists.

Yes, you can legally rent and purchase lists of people who have agreed to email communications — but it’s never a good idea. Not only is it a dirty email marketing tactic that goes against the Terms of Service for your email service provider, but these people don’t actually know you — and it’s likely they won’t even want your emails. In other words, there’s a good change they’ll mark you as spam. Plus, let’s be honest … high quality email addresses are never for sale.

2) Don’t scrape sites for email addresses.

Scraping websites for email addresses may seem like a fast way to build a contact list, but it’s bad for your business — not to mention illegal in many countries, including the United States, thanks to the CAN-SPAM Act.

3) Don’t email people who have bounced repeatedly.

Hard bounces are the result of an invalid, closed, or non-existent email address, and these emails will never be successfully delivered. Bounce rates are one of the key factors internet service providers (ISPs) use to determine an email sender’s reputation, so having too many hard bounces can cause them to stop allowing your emails in folks’ inboxes.

(Email deliverability is covered extensively in HubSpot’s free email marketing certification course, so check that out to learn more.)

4) Don’t use all caps anywhere in your email or its subject line.

Don’t yell at people. It’s not nice. Using all caps in your subject line might get the recipients’ attention, but probably not in a good way. Using all caps can really rub people the wrong way. It’s annoying and can seem spammy.

In fact, according to a study by the Radicati Group, more than 85% of respondents prefer an all-lowercase subject line to one in all caps. 

Instead of using disruptive tactics like all caps to get people’s attention, try personalizing your emails, establishing relevancy, and using catchy and delightful language. (Read this blog post on how to write compelling emails for more tips.)

5) Don’t use exclamation points!!!!!

Another thing that can make your subject line and/or email look unprofessional and spammy? Exclamation points — especially a whole bunch of them in a row. And when 69% of email recipients report email as spam based solely on the subject line, you’ll want to stay away from triggers like this as much as you can.

Plus, when you ask punctuation to do a word’s job, it can really dilute your message. The next time you’re tempted to use an exclamation point in an email (or anywhere, really), use this flowchart, “Should I Use an Exclamation Point?”, as a gut check.

6) Don’t use video, Flash, or JavaScript within your email.

By default, most email clients don’t allow the ability to view rich media like Flash or video embeds. Instead, use an image of your video player (with a play button) that links to the rich media on a website page.

As for JavaScript and other dynamic scripts, even if a spam filter allows your email through, most email clients won’t allow these scripts to function — so avoid using them altogether.

7) Don’t embed forms in your emails.

Forms aren’t supported in email across common email clients due to security risks. Instead, place a call-to-action button or a link to a landing page with a form in the body of your email.

(HubSpot customers: Learn how to add a call-to-action button to your emails in HubSpot here, and how to create a form for your landing pages in HubSpot here.)

8) Don’t include attachments to your emails.

If you want to send your recipients something like a PDF or a Word document, don’t attach the file to the email — otherwise your email could get blocked by spam filters. Instead, upload the attachment to your website and link to the file location in your email using an effective call-to-action button. This’ll minimize the chance of being blocked by spam filters and decrease the load time of your email.

(HubSpot users: HubSpot’s attachment tool in the email editor automatically does this for you. Simply highlight a bit of text or an image and click the attachment icon, and HubSpot will turn that text or image into a link leading to that attachment.) 

9) Don’t use spam trigger words.

One of easiest ways to avoid spam filters is by carefully choosing the words you use in your email’s subject line. A good rule of thumb is this: If it sounds like something a used car salesman would say, it’s probably a spam trigger word. Think “free,” “guarantee,” no obligation,” and so on. (For more, look at this list of common spam trigger words.)

Instead of using these trigger words, be creative, interesting, and informative — without giving too much away. Some better ideas for subject lines include:

• “Hi [name], [question]?”
• “Did you get what you were looking for?”
• “You are not alone.”
• “Feeling blue? Like puppies?”

10) Don’t use a red font when drafting your emails.

Same goes for using invisible text, i.e. a white font on top of a white background. These are common tricks that spammers use, so it’s an instant red flag for spam filters. 

In fact, people don’t like when marketers use irregular fonts, font sizes, and font colors at all in emails. In that same study by the Radicati Group, out of the top 10 objectionable email trends, four revolve around fonts. Over 60% of respondents considered it unacceptable for email marketers to use different font sizes, irregular fonts, and different font colors. Nearly 70% of respondents prefer fonts to be one size.

11) Don’t forget to use spell check.

According to that Radicati Group study, 80% of all respondents find spelling and grammatical errors the most unacceptable email offense. But spelling mistakes aren’t just unprofessional — they’re actually a spam trigger, too.

It’s easy for little spelling mistakes to slip by — especially when you’re self-editing. Read this post to learn the most common spelling and grammar mistakes so you never make them again.

12) Don’t jam pack your email copy with keywords.

Keyword-stuffing your emails means shoving as many keywords into your emails as you can. There’s a reason Google give a lower rank to webpages that are stuffed with keywords — and that’s because it’s harmful to user experience. No one wants to read content that’s optimized for a robot.

To make it more likely folks will open your emails and not mark them as spam, write your emails for humans, not robots. Copywriting that makes people want to take action is both simple and compelling. To make your writing sound more personable and relatable, use casual language, colloquial expressions, and even personal anecdotes.

I love the example below from Turnstyle (from our roundup of 12 great email marketing examples). The copy is beautiful in its simplicity. It’s friendly, yet sincere — especially with the following lines:

• “We know you are busy and would hate to see you miss out”
• “Please let us know if we can help accommodate in any way possible”
• “Feel free to give us a call – we want to help :)”

Plus, they provided me with the exact details I needed to know — a reminder of what I’d signed up for and when, the expiration date, and a phone number to reach them. Check it out:

13) Don’t use an overwhelming number of images, or huge images.

Using one large image as your entire email, or too many images in general, tends to end up in recipients’ spam folders.

You’ll also want to make your image file sizes as small as possible without losing their visual integrity to prevent long email load times. (If you’re a HubSpot user, the email tool automatically compresses images in emails so they load faster. For non-HubSpot users, some good image compression tools include Compressor.io, Compressjpeg.com, and Jpegmini.com.)

Not to mention, Microsoft Outlook doesn’t recognize background images, so you may want to avoid those and use a background color instead.

What You Should Do

14) Do keep your email lists current & clean.

Even if your list is entirely built on valid opt-ins, you are at risk of being branded a “spammer” if you don’t practice proper email hygiene. Why? Because internet service providers (ISPs) base complaint rates on active subscribers, not total subscribers.

Also, expired email addresses can turn into SPAM traps, meaning that even if you acquired emails in a legitimate manner, the abandoned addresses that haven’t engaged in years may have morphed into spam traps. Hitting even just one spam trap can cause deliverability problems.

Expired email addresses can also turn into unknown users (bounces). If you hit unknown accounts at a rate higher that 5%, then ISPs are going to see you as someone who has really bad email hygiene. The result? They’ll make it harder for your emails to reach people’s inboxes, and your overall sender reputation will definitely drop — leading to even more trouble reaching people’s inboxes.

By keeping your email lists current and clean, you’ll decrease the likelihood people will flag your emails as spam. You can identify inactive subscribers and expired email addresses with metrics such as opens, clicks, or website activity. 

15) See if you can reengage inactive or infrequently active subscribers.

“Graymail” refers to email people technically opted in to receive, but don’t really want, leading them to become less active or inactive altogether. Although it’s not considered spam, sending graymail is problematic because it can hurt the deliverability of your email overall. Tipped off by low engagement rates, ISPs and inbox providers may deliver email from known-graymail senders straight to recipients’ “junk” folders — so the email technically gets sent (and can even appear to have been delivered), but it’s not necessarily seen.

Keep track of your inactive and infrequently active subscribers, and develop re-engagement campaigns for contacts who have stopped engaging with your messages. For example, you could set conditions such as the length of time since their last form submission, website visit, or email click, triggering the email when it’s been a while since a contact last engaged with you.

In your workflow, you might try sending them an exclusive offer or coupon to get them excited about your company again. Or, you might ask them for feedback by sending out a quick survey to see what they would like to see in your emails. (Read this blog post for more ideas for launching an effective email re-engagement campaign.)

16) Do use double opt-in.

Double opt-in means that after someone subscribes to your email list, you send them a follow-up email with a confirmation link ensuring they actually want to receive email communications from you.

Users that have to confirm that they want email communications from your company are the ones that will fully read and engage with the emails they receive from your business. When you use double opt-in, your email lists will be much more qualified and your subscribers much more engaged. (HubSpot customers: Learn how to set up double opt-in in HubSpot here.)

17) Do ask your subscribers to add you to their address book.

Spam filters are more aggressive than ever — so much so that sometimes, the emails people value and want to read still end up in their spam boxes.

But most spam filters allow you to whitelist a sender by adding their email address to their email’s address book. When subscribers add you to their address book, spam filters will back off. 

18) Do include a clear unsubscribe link and a physical mailing address in your email footer.

Allowing people to unsubscribe is important for list hygiene because anyone receiving your emails should actually want to receive them — otherwise, you’re just spamming them. But did you know that it’s illegal to not have a way for your recipients to easily unsubscribe in many countries, including the United States?

In your marketing emails, you must include a way for folks to unsubscribe from your email list, either by simply sending a reply email or by clicking no more than one level deep to reach a page from which they can unsubscribe. Which method you choose is entirely up to you, as long as the information is clear and easy to locate.

The most common place for these unsubscribe CTAs is in the footer of your email, so users tend to know to look for it there — which makes for a better user experience. Here’s an example from one of HubSpot’s emails:

In addition to the unsubscribe link, include a link to update subscriber preferences, which you can also see in the example above. That way, recipients can unsubscribe from just one type of email instead of all of them.

19) Do honor unsubscribes.

If someone unsubscribes, they must come off your email list. It’s the law. This should go without saying. Check out this list of effective unsubscribe pages to make the unsubscribe process a little more delightful for recipients.

This is where email marketing software that integrates seamlessly with your CRM comes in handy — because any unsubscribes are immediately processed and recorded in both the contact record and within the email software. (But if you’re removing unsubscribed addresses from your list manually, make it a top priority to process that request.)

20) Do use a familiar sender name.

Because people are so inundated with SPAM, they hesitate to open email from unfamiliar senders. Make sure recipients can recognize you in your sender by using your brand name.

Better yet, send the email from a real person. Recipients are typically more likely to trust a personalized sender name and email address than a generic one. At HubSpot we found that that emails sent from “Maggie Georgieva, HubSpot” perform better in terms of open and clickthrough rate than emails sent from just “HubSpot.” (HubSpot customers: Learn how to personalize the “From” name and email address here.)

21) Do include your recipient’s name in the “To:” field.

This way, spam filters know that you do, indeed, know your recipient. Plus, personalizing your emails around your contacts can also be vital to their engagement with your content.

22) Do offer both an HTML and a plain text version of your emails.

Plain text emails are simply emails void of any formatting, while HTML (HyperText Markup Language) emails use formatting that let you design more beautiful emails with attractive visual components. By offering both a plain text and HTML version of a single email, you’re not only indicating your legitimacy to ISPs, but you’re also making your emails more reader-friendly.

Most email marketing tools will let you easily create plain-text versions within their email editor, so take those five extra minutes to create and optimize the plain-text version of your email. (HubSpot customers: Learn how to create a plain-text email in HubSpot here.)

Also, make sure the HTML version is properly coded: If there are broken tags in your HTML, the email provider and users might mark it as spam. 

23) Do allow people to view your email in a web browser.

Even after every step is taken to assure proper email design, an email client can still display an email poorly. Include a link in every email to view the email as a web page. (HubSpot customers: Learn how to do this easily in HubSpot here.)

24) Include alt text in your email images.

Many email clients block images by default. This means that when someone opens your email, the images won’t load unless they click a button to show them or change their default settings. Adding alt text to your images helps recipients understand your message even if they can’t see the images.

This is especially bad if you use an image as a call-to-action. Without alt text, a “turned off” image will look like this:

When you add alt text to the image, recipients will still know where to click to complete the action:

You can either edit the alt text in your email tool’s rich text editor (just right-click the image and edit away), or you can manually enter it in the HTML editor of your email tool like this:

<a href=”HTTP://YOURLINKHERE.COM“><img class=”alignCenter shadow” src=”YOUR CTA BUTTON IMAGE SOURCE HERE.JPG” alt-text=”YOUR ALT-TEXT GOES HERE“/></a>

25) Do keep emails short.

Too much copy is another red flag for spam filters. Not only that, but people generally like concise emails better. Everyone’s busy and their inbox is already full, so why make things worse?

One of the best ways to keep things short and sweet is to write like a human. Writing your email like you were talking to someone in real life makes it feel much more approachable and relevant. (Read this blog post on how to write compelling emails for more tips.)

If you do have to write a lengthier email, then break it up into multiple paragraphs. Giving visual breaks and composing the email with a clear introduction, middle, and conclusion will make it much easier on your reader.

26) Do test emails before sending them.

There are a lot of email clients out there these days that email marketers have to consider when creating emails. On top of that, we have to consider mobile users, too — after all, 53% of people read email on their mobile devices.

It turns out each of these clients displays emails differently. While it may be time-consuming to test out your emails for all email clients, you’ll want to test them for the ones your audience uses the most. According to Litmus’ research of 1.06 billion email opens, the top five email clients are:

1. Apple iPhone’s Mail app (28% of users)
2. Gmail (16% of users)
3. Apple iPad’s Mail app (11% of users)
4. Google Android’s Mail app (9% of users)
5. Outlook (9% of users)

If your email marketing tool lets you, go ahead and preview what your email looks like in different email clients and devices that are popular with your audience. (HubSpot customers: Use our Preview in other inboxes feature to send a test email and see how the design of your email looks in each email client.)

You should also send out a test version of your email before you send out the real deal to ensure it’s working properly. (HubSpot customers: Learn how to test your emails here.)

27) Do get email sender accreditation from a third party.

Sender accreditation is a third-party process of verifying email senders and requiring them to follow certain usage guidelines. In return, you’ll be listed in a trusted listing that ISPs reference to allow certain emails to bypass email filters.

28) Do monitor your sender reputation.

Your emails’ deliverability depends largely on your IP address’ reputation. If you’re sending email from an IP address with a poor reputation, your emails are far less likely to be successfully delivered to senders’ inboxes.

DNSstuff.com lets you check on whether or not you are a blacklisted sender — something many unlucky email marketers aren’t even aware of.

29) Do stay up-to-date on changes in email sending laws, ISP behavior, and spam filter technology.

Email marketing is constantly evolving, and staying in the know helps ensure you’re always following best practices — and the law. Responsible and legitimate email marketers make a point of regularly reading up on email sending laws, ISP behavior, and spam filter technology. If you’re looking for more information, check in with your company’s legal department or a trusted lawyer to ensure you’re staying within the boundaries of the law.

What other techniques not included on this list do you use to increase your rate of email deliverability? Share with us in the comments.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in January 2012 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

 

Throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks is no way to form a content strategy. Schools – like any brand or business – need to know who they are, who they’re talking to, and what makes them so special.

Building your personas is part of this process (you can find free templates for that here). They’re the “who” you’re talking to.  Much of your message is the substance of what you’re saying. But your school also needs to pay attention to the “how” you’re talking to them. The “how” is a mixture of voice and tone.

Let’s define out terms. 

• Voice is the personality you show while communicating your school’s message.
• Tone is the attitude or mood shown in any specific instance.

It’s easy to confuse voice and tone, so let me stick with that a bit longer. When you think of someone’s personality, you think of it as fixed. Personality can be complicated and it has different facets, but people are who they are. 

Having a distinctive, identifiable voice sharing your content is critical to communicating your school’s message. Your school’s content won’t stand out in the sea of content that washes over your prospects every day without it. And if that’s true, your prospects certainly won’t remember or recognize your school’s voice from among all of the other schools vying for their attention. Maybe they like a post on your blog, but so what if they can’t remember it came from your school!

If you don’t know what your school’s voice is, you risk having content produced in a voice that contradicts the substance of your message. If your school’s key message is that you develop character in your students, not just college-ready grades – how easily is that message undermined by content that’s heavy on the slang?

Finding Your Voice

To find your school’s voice, you have to start with clear messages. What are your school’s fundamental values? How do you want others to describe your school? What makes your school different from others that may have similar values? 

Hold some focus groups with different stakeholders at your school to hear how they answer these questions. Students, staff, counselors. Why have they chosen to be part of this community? Get a variety of perspectives. If your school has already defined its key messages, the focus groups are the place to get feedback on whether those messages resonate with the right people, or whether they need to be refined.

Then get a sense of what sort of voice make sense for your school. Ask them to imagine the school as a real person with a distinct personality; how do they describe her personality? Have people share their backstory for using certain adjectives to describe your school. These can help reveal deeper associations the school holds for them. 

Review a good cross section of your content. Which have a voice and tone that engage and present an identifiable perspective? What views, words, phrases, attitudes reinforce the substance of the message your school wants to communicate? Which are too generic to show any personality? What are they lacking?

Be sure to take a close look at your school’s mission statement and pull out the values embedded there.

Look at how your prospects talk about your school, or their school selection process. This is different from looking at what they’re asking about, or what their concerns are. Look at how they talk about these things on social media, in their emails to your admissions office, and in focus groups, the questions they ask during campus tours, etc. What words and phrases do they use?

The deliverable you want from each of these steps is a list of words and phrases that describe your school’s values and personality. These are the building blocks of creating a consistent voice/tone brand for your school.

Want to see which keywords you (and your competitors) already rank for? Try out our Keyword Tool here >>

Select three to five of these words that really distill your school to its best self. After this process, you may have list like: opportunity, access, community, warm, supportive.

Creating a Voice/Tone Matrix

Now that you can describe your school’s values and personality, you can start building a vocabulary around them. How formal or informal are you? How does that vary based on context? If your school’s voice leans towards the more formal, your blog posts will still likely have a less formal tone than your program brochures.

Where do slang or technical jargon fit into your school’s voice? Should they always be avoided? Or how will they be used in some places to vary tone so content with the same voice doesn’t get repetitive? 

Is your school a “we” or an “it” when mentioned in your content? If your school personality is a warm, supportive community, you probably will decide to refer to your school as “we.” If it’s stern but fair mentor, then perhaps your academy gets the third-person instead of first-person pronoun.

Here’s a useful list of 12 elements that make up brand voice.

Document your school’s voice by creating a table with your defining words in one column. The next column should contain a short explanation of what that value is intended to communicate about your school. Use the final two columns to provide samples of words and phrases and that are good to use to express that value, and those which should be avoided. 

Share this voice/tone matrix with the people and departments who will be writing content for your school. Make sure to keep space within the school’s defined voice for different departments to put their own stamp on that voice. The alumni office may develop its own tone that fits its primary audience, which may be distinct from the tone preferred by the campus life office.

Aiming for Consistent Uniqueness

All of this creates a unique voice and set of messages that can help you define a keyword strategy and influence content decisions.  AND it helps your content be consistent across teams.

A consistent voice is an integral part of synchronizing your marketing efforts to achieve maximum impact of your message. When your school’s voice is recognizable across all the school’s content, it increases the authenticity and credibility of your content and by extension, your school.