Many email senders rage against the machine - the spam filtering machine, that is, and specifically spam filters for email. And it's easy to understand why: legitimate email getting caught and misidentified as spam, also known as false positives, can play all sorts of havoc for an email sender. But consider this: what would the email world look like if the email receivers (ISPs and inbox providers) didn't use spam filters?
Wondering how to avoid spam filters and your email going to spam? Here's a very basic thing to remember: one of the main reasons that spam filters, and even people, may mistake your email for spam is because, in fact, the content of your email makes your email look like spam. Remember that old saw, that "content is king"? Well, content can also be the joker, where the joke is on you. Because if your content is garish or gaudy, or full of lots of big images and little text, then instead of getting the royal treatment, it may go straight to the spam folder.
What a great way to start the week – getting to announce our newest service: our […]
We've talked before about the things that can artificially suppress open rates, and the dangers inherent in not being aware of the issues. And of course we've talked about the importance of continuing to monitor your open rates, even after iOS 15, because hey, the inbox providers continue to monitor them. Now we're going to share with you a real-life story about how a business gave a loyal subscriber the boot because that subscriber was reading email without loading images, and so the business assumed they were inactive. Don't make this mistake.
We recently had one of our email accreditation customers ask us whether we would contact all of the blacklists listed at on a particular site on their behalf, because the site listed their IP address' reputation with these blacklists as "neutral".
Every so often we run into a sender who has a sense of entitlement - or even righteous indignation - about how an ISP should, must - even has to - accept their email. Whether because it's "requested" or opt-in or because it "complies with CAN-SPAM", the sender gets all in our face about how a given ISP has a responsiblity and duty to accept their email. Sometimes they even rant that it's required by {CAN-SPAM| tort law | the 1st Amendment | insert your favourite rant here}. Except, that's completely wrong.
We're always thinking about ways that we can boost our customers' deliverability and email reputation to previously unheard of heights. And, as we've mentioned recently, open rates are still important, not withstanding what some might say. That's because ISPs and inbox providers still look at your open rates to see if people are really interested in receiving and reading your email.
Getting spam complaints and not knowing who made a particular email spam complaint is really frustrating. We get it. A common complaint that we hear, particularly from email senders who are signed up for feedback loops from ISPs, is "why won't the ISPs let us know who is complaining and clicking "this is spam" on our email, so that we can unsubscribe them?" This is frustrating for senders who are following all best email marketing practices, including confirmed opt-in, because it means that someone who confirmed their consent to receive the email still complained that it was spam! (There are a few things that can cause someone who requested your email to still complain that it's spam, which we go into in a different article.)
I recently had the pleasure of working with journalist Karen Bannen, on an article that she was doing for BtoB Online. Karen interviewed both myself and R. Dave Lewis for the piece, in which she distilled down to their essence 5 ways to improve your email deliverability.
We've talked in the past about why address book importing is just not ok. But in addition to the fact that it trains people to enter their passwords at third-party sites, and to the fact that when you send out all those invitations it makes you look like a spammer, there's another big reason to not do address book importing.
