10 Tips to Avoid the Spam Folder

If you want to improve your emails’ deliverability, constantly test it in order to help your legitimate email end up in the Customer’s Inbox. This post will equip you with the best email marketing strategies. Follow them, and you will surely prevent your electronic mail from being delivered to the spam folder.

1. Watch Out for CAN-SPAM Compliance

The CAN-SPAM Act is the name of the law setting the regulations for commercial email, outlining the requirements for all commercial messages, and specifying the right of recipients to stop senders from emailing them. This legislation spells out a serious penalty if any of its rules get violated.

It needs to be said that the legislation does not make any exceptions for business-to-business emails. In other words, it ensures that every email — for instance, messages to former clients informing about the launch of a new line of products — have to comply with the existing law.

In this regard, every single email violating the CAN-SPAM Act gets subject to harsh penalties. Some of these may reach $16,000, which means that non-compliance is expensive. However, it is not complicated to follow the legislation. Below you can see a rundown of key CAN-SPAM’s demands:

– Don’t provide untrue or misleading information in your headers. The information in the sections “Reply-To,” “From,” and “To” as well as routing information, such as the name of the domain of origin and the sender’s email — have to come in an accurate form and must clearly identify the individual or company that sent the electronic message.

– Don’t create deceptive lines in the line where you state the subject. This line must precisely indicate the message content. You can refer to a nice subject line spam checker if you decide you need to test a variety of Subject lines you have and want to check if the Subject impacts your deliverability in any way.

– Mark the message as an advertisement. The legislation provides you with a lot of leeway in the way you can do this, yet you have to disclose in a clear and conspicuous way that your messages are actually ads.

– Inform the recipients about your location. The message you send must incorporate your real postal address (physical).

– Inform the recipients about the ways of opting out of getting emails in future from your firm. The message you send ought to contain a clear and easy-to-understand explanation of the ways in which recipients are able to refuse from getting your emails if they wish to do so some time in the future.

– Promptly respond to opt-out requests. Those opt-out ways that you offer should be capable of processing opt-out requests of your recipients within 30 days at least from the day when your message was sent. In fact, you are obliged to respond to any opt-out request sent by your recipients within the timeframe of ten business days.

Go to : Everything You Should Know about Spam Complaints

– Monitor actions taken by other parties on your behalf. The legislation in question makes it clear that in case you have hired another firm to deal with your email marketing, your legal responsibility of compliance with the legislation is not contracted away. Both the firm whose service or product gets promoted in the email and the firm that sends the message in reality are likely to be stated as legally responsible.

Nevertheless, if you center on sending just transactional emails or relationship-focused content, you become exempt from the aforementioned rules. Still, you have to remember not to use the routing information that is either untrue or misleading.

2. Utilize Permission Based Approach to Marketing

Obtain permission from your email recipients to deliver them your company’s marketing emails. Upload a subscription form onto your website or, alternatively, your landing page and request visitors to continue with a subscription to your mailing list. Then, take another step and ask your visitors to confirm subscribing for the purposes of avoiding being treated as spam and bot subscribing.

3. Evade Spam Traps

What are spam traps? These are email addresses used by ISPs as well as by various anti-spam organizations seeking to spot spammers. Email addresses are typically not utilized by humans; hence one can see no chance for them to get subscribed to anyone’s mailing list. Therefore, all messages which turn out sent to such spam trap address are thought to be spam.

In order to evade these trap emails on your list, abstain from buying lists from different email brokers and stop harvesting email addresses on the web. Refer to a confirmed opt-in process set up on your own website or your landing page.

4. Request that Recipients Whitelist You

You can also take one more step at the point of subscribing and request that the subscribers add the address of the sending email to their whitelists or to their lists of safe senders. You could display the instruction on whitelisting straight on the “Thank You” page, later repeating these in your first sent newsletter.

5. Get Your IP Out from Blacklists

Note, if you end up in a situation when the sending IP address gets included onto a blacklist, you will find it truly difficult to get emails to the Inboxes of your receivers. Utilize G-Lock Apps IP monitor of reputation for the purposes of checking if the IP address of your email server gets blacklisted or if it does not. It is possible to enable email notifications and receive notifications once the system manages to detect any issues with blacklisting.

Consider: How to Avoid Spam Filters When Sending Emails

Once you noticed that you have ended up on a blacklist, visit that site that has included you to the blacklist in order to find the removal instructions.

If you need nice guides, check the ones below and learn the ways to discover if your sending IP has been blacklisted by Hotmail or other services such as Gmail or Yahoo and see how to secure the subsequent removal:

How to Remove Your IP Address from Gmail’s Blacklist

How to Remove Your IP Address from the Hotmail/Outlook’s Blacklist

How to Remove Your IP Address from the Yahoo!’s Blacklist

6. Ensure Your Authentication Records Have Been Set Up Correctly

Many ISPs consider your records of authentication in order to make a decision on whether they should deliver your electronic messages to the Inbox or they should filter them as a spam messages. Therefore, make sure the server used by the email aligns with these protocols (including SPF, DKIM, and Sender ID) and the latter get correctly implemented. Below you will find a comprehensive guide on email authentication.

It needs to be mentioned here that G-Lock Apps will check your authentication (DKIM and SPF) automatically; thus, you will actually find out whether you have an issue with authentication in your ultimate testing report.

The points covered above will help you make sure that all is fine with the technical aspects of your program of email marketing. However, the manner in which you design the messages in your emails is no less important. Therefore, go on with reading the list below in order to know how to ensure that the newsletter of your email looks not like the one from a spam email.

7. Watch Out for Spam Trigger or Certain Phishing Expressions

Spam filters react to commercial ads as well as to pure promotions. Actually, it doesn’t mean that trigger words are forbidden. Yet, you ought to sparingly utilize such words and expressions that are typical in promotion emails.

Find out more in : How I Beat Google & Decreased My Spam Rate from 35.2% to 2.8%

As to phishing emails, they get sent with the aim of stealing the email recipient’s identity when the receiver clicks on a certain fraudulent link. Typically, phishing emails appear as legitimate ones sent from a trusted company or individual, for instance, the bank you are connected with or a certain site you utilize. Therefore, avoid the expressions commonly used in phishing attacks when compiling your emails.

8. Provide a Text Version Along with HTML

Using solely an HTML part is a widespread cause of emails’ landing in the customer’s spam folder. Check that your email gets sent in the format MIME (aka HTML + plain text). This turns out not just a fine strategy to pass through spam filters, but also a strategy that guarantees a favorable outcome in cases when recipients are unable to view HTML emails.

9. Maintain a Reasonable Text to Image Ratio

For those of you who send images, below are several tips to take into account:

– avoid sending a single image;

– incorporate a few lines of text for every image;

– try to optimize your images as good as you can;

– utilize a proper HTML for email.

10. Do Not Use Specific Attachment Types

If you decide to send the files with the .jpg, .png, .gif, .pdf, as well as .zip extensions, you may not worry because they are generally safe in terms of being sent as attachments given that you have included some content, too. Yet, executable files, among them .exe or .swf, oughtn’t be sent. Likewise, larga attachments are able to cause your email to get filtered as mere spam.

Hence, in case you need to mail a big attachment or any attachment of a kind that typically ends up as spam or triggers virus scanners, you’d rather upload the file to your website and then provide the link for downloading it in your email. Use DropBox.com or a similar service to upload your file as an option. You can also upload the file to the website of your company unless you are confident about the security of data.