Are Your Emails Banished to the Bride’s Spam Folder?

Are Your Emails Banished to the Bride’s Spam Folder?

One of the strategies we recommend to improve your email response from brides and grooms is to include your photo and links in your email signature.

Pros of the Image Email Signature

• It presents you as a “real” person, making you more likeable, so that couples more likely to do business with you.

• It increases your response rate.  Brides and grooms can blow off a faceless vendor easily, but it’s more difficult to ignore a smiling, friendly face.

• It’s a simple, easy way to grow your social media following when you include links to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.

• It allows you to promote any special deals or offers.

• It’s free promotion if that bride/groom forwards your email to someone else.

• It invites people to visit your website.

However, there are some dangers involved whenever you’re dealing with email.

If you mess this up, your email will end up in the bride’s Spam Folder…if it even gets delivered at all.

These Email Signature Mistakes Get Your Message Stuck in Spam

• Attaching an image.  Any attachments to an email make it more likely to hit the spam filters, and if they do get through, couples may be reluctant to open them.

• Long load time.  If it takes more than two seconds for your email to load, it’s not going to get opened.

• Too many images and links.  I once received an email from a wedding pro that had literally three pages of images and links at the end!  It took about 10 minutes to load.  Your chances of that getting through to the bride or groom are next to zero.

In the past, we’ve recommended a service called Wise Stamp to create an easy, professional email signature.  However, this now comes with a warning.

Wise Stamp (and other similar email signature applications) have been known to cause email delivery failure with some email clients.

One of our super-savvy Book More Brides clients reported that her email response rate dropped dramatically…from 95% down to 15%…when she added Wise Stamp to her signature.  Apparently, many brides and grooms were not receiving her email responses at all.

Fortunately, she was tracking her response rates and recognized the problem.  After removing Wise Stamp, her response rate improved again.

A quick Google search revealed that other people have had similar problems with this application.  Because of this, we no longer recommend Wise Stamp as a solution for creating an email signature.

Alternative Email Signature Solutions

• Use old-fashioned links to your website and social media accounts.  These are typically more trusted than fancy icons and display clearly in all browsers.

• Use Gmail to upload an image and create a simple signature.  We’ve used this for years without issue.

• Include a link to a welcome video on YouTube.  If the bride or groom has a Gmail address, they can click and play right inside the email.  If not, YouTube is a trusted video site where people are more likely to click through.

•  Before testing other email signature solutions, use Email On Acid to test the appearance and deliverability on multiple email clients.

What can we learn from this?

When it comes to implementing changes in your wedding business, especially with sensitive features like email, be sure you’re tracking your results to measure increases or decreases in effectiveness.  Once false move and you could be missing out on precious leads!

What do you think about using an email signature?

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