A key way to email marketing success is having a low number of spam complaints. Spam complaints can happen for a number of reasons: subscribers may not remember signing up for the list, and mark the message as spam in their inbox. However, having a high number of spam complaints can hurt your sender reputation and hurt the delivery of your messages. Avoid these spam complaints by following these good practices:
Make sure you have the subscriber’s correct and valid email address before you start sending to them. Some people will put in fake email addresses like asdf@asdf.com when they sign up through forms that don’t require email confirmation.
Critical Impact’s sign up forms have the option to enable double opt-ins, which sends a confirmation email to the subscriber. If the subscriber receives the message and clicks to confirm their subscription, they’re added to your list and you know for sure that the email address is a good one!
Use a from address or subject line that clearly shows who sent the message. If it’s a company name they recognize, they’re more likely to open the message and less likely to mark a message as spam.
Also, you can try adding a line of text in your message to remind subscribers why they are receiving the message:
You are receiving this message because you signed up for the Association Newsletter
Keep your list healthy by cleaning it periodically. Consider removing subscribers from your list if they haven’t clicked on any of your messages in the last year or two.
Also, if you find an old list you last sent to 5 years ago, take a moment to think before sending to these subscribers. A lot of those email addresses may have expired. For example, if someone is fired and their company deletes their email address, now when you try to send a message to them, it’ll hard bounce.
Purchased lists can contain a lot of spam traps, which are email addresses that never opt-in for mailings. Sending to spam trap email addresses tells the ISPs that you are sending to a non-permission based list that was likely harvested from the internet, which can make them stop delivering your messages.
In addition, Critical Impact has established its reputation among ISPs by taking a firm position against unsolicited email. We maintain an absolute zero-tolerance policy with respect to “SPAM” related email. So make sure to get permission to send to each of your subscribers.
Your message may be marked as spam if you have content that matches content typically found in spam messages. Avoid spelling errors, high ratio of images to text, suspicious looking subject lines, etc.
You can run the Spam/Link checker in Critical Impact to check if your links are working links or if you have content that may trigger a spam filter. Since spam filters are constantly changing, it’s important to also send yourself test messages before making a live send.
