Email Best Practices: Keep Your Emails Out of the SPAM Folder

How to Prevent Your Emails from Entering the SPAM Folder

There are two key aspects of spam prevention to look at when considering email as a tool for marketing your products and services:

1. Server-side settings – These are configurations and options that need to be setup on the server where your email marketing messages will begin their journey. Your hosting provider should generally set these.
2. Email content – Your email content should be something your recipients want to read. They should also follow the requirements set by the CAN-SPAM act.

Below is a checklist of items to be implemented when composing an email for marketing purposes. By applying these, we believe that the likelihood of your email entering the SPAM folder will be greatly reduced.

Server-side Settings

1. Set up Domain Keys: Domain keys are an email authentication system designed to verify the DNS of a domain an email sender to validate integrity.
2. SPF Records: Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is fairly new method for fighting spam. An SPF record is placed within the domain DNS (Domain Name Server) settings and specifies a list of authorized hostnames and IP address that can mail from the server for the specified domain name.
3. Reverse DNS, sometimes referred to as PTR record check: This is particularly important when your domain resides on a shared server (i.e., the space is shared with other domains). The reverse DNS setting specifies the domain associated with your IP address. Some email servers perform a reverse look up to see if the domain/IP address that the domain is registered to matches the domain/IP address that the email originated from, and blocks any mismatches.
4. Secure Server: The server where your email client resides should be secure, open relay and proxy servers are highly susceptible to abuse. With an unsecured server, spammers can easily hijack your account and use your resources for spamming.
5. Segregate your email streams: If possible, it would be advisable to split up large email sends to multiple lists with multiple IP addresses assigned to them. In this instance, if one IP address or email list becomes blocked or spammed out for whatever reason, it will not have an effect on your other lists/IP addresses. Obviously your goal for ensuring good email content and best practices should remain.

Email Content

1. Adhere to the CAN-SPAM Act: First and foremost, if you follow these best practice guidelines, all of the following points will also be adhered.
   See the Official Compliance Guide for Business here: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/business/ecommerce/bus61.shtm
2. Use Opt-in subscriptions: Only send emails to recipients who have subscribed (opted-in) to your service.
3. Regularly manage your email list: Spammers are notorious for sending mass emails and do not care about bounces etc, they just want to send in large quantities with the hope that some get delivered. Bounced email addresses and bad email addresses, not only degrade the performance of your emails, but also if you consistently try to send to these invalid and bounced email addresses, your are effectively telling their ISP that you are spamming as there’s no one managing the list. Make sure you remove bad emails right away to maintain a high quality email list.
4. Content relevancy: Your email subscribers have enlisted your email service to receive valuable content from you that should be relative to the sign up message. Make sure that you keep that message in line with your promise when they signed up. If you start sending unrelated or even less related information in your emails, you’re likely to get marked as spam.
5. Header information: Make sure that you send from a consistent email address and associated name. If you switch those settings around, your recipients will not recognize the header information and may be less likely to read your message eventually marking as spam.
6. Unsubscribes: If an email user unsubscribes to your email service, be sure to remove them right away. Most email software on the market today will unsubscribe the email addresses automatically when users unsubscribe using the relevant form, which is great, but do not neglect those that simply reply to your email asking to be removed. Make sure that you include an unsubscribe link in all of your email messages so that users can safely be removed if they want to cease receiving your emails. Otherwise they will be inclined to mark you as spam and therefore hamper your relationship with ISPs.
7. Physical address: Although emails are “virtual addresses”, be sure to include your physical address also. This will help with the validity of your message in the eyes of your recipients and also help tie in with your company recognition, that is, you are a real company.
8. Common SPAM terms: Every ISP has their own unique rules for marking a message as spam or not. These rules usually encompass the use of certain words or phrases in both the subject line and body content. The following is a list of known terms to avoid that will help you reach the inbox; Information you requested; Important information regarding; Guarantee, Guaranteed; Special Promotion; Great offer/Deal; Visit our website; Opportunity; 50% Off; Click Here; Call Now; Subscribe; Bonus; Free; All New; One time; Order Now; Amazing; Discount; Save up to; One time; Winner; Prizes.
9. URL links: Excessive use of links in your email message will almost certainly get you into the spam folder. The concept is that email marketers inserting too many links are aggressively trying to sell something and pushing it on the recipient. Although there is no hard fast rule and every ISP is different, I would suggest not exceeding 5 or 7 links per email message and would avoid placing a URL in the subject line entirely.
10. Personalization: By addressing your email messages to the individual subscriber, you are not only proving that you know more than just the recipients email address, but you have their name too. Statistics show that personalization increases open and read rates by about 600%.
11. Layout: Keep your email content clean and consistent. By using multi-sized fonts, colors and typefaces, you are creating a visual mishmash of content and won’t do you any favors when it comes to spam.
12. Attachments: Mailing an attachment to individuals or a small group of coworkers etc. is generally not a problem. However, when you start emailing an attachment to thousands of email addresses, you will likely end up in the spam folder. Instead offer the attachment for download or create a web page with the content that you’d like to share and provide the link in the email.
13. ALL CAPS: Avoid typing in all caps, even for brief sentences to highlight a point. It is much better practice to use bold or bold/italics to add emphasis to a section of your email. ALL CAPS text implies aggressiveness and a forceful approach. ISPs see this and are likely to spam your message out.

Additional Points

1. Feedback Loops (FBL): A feedback loop is an agreement you can make with ISPs where they get back to you the identity of complainers in their web mail. On your side you commit to blacklist/remove the user from your email list. You will need to provide certain information to each ISP to become enrolled in their program. A list of links to the application forms for the main ISPs can be found here:
   http://website.email-ethics.com/feedback-loops
2. Bounce handling: Soft and hard bounces should be handled appropriately. Your email software may have these capabilities built in. Typically, the standard procedure for soft bounces is to retry sending the email a number of times, if the email still bounces after these attempts, the email address will become a hard bounce. A soft bounce occurs if the mailbox is full for example. For hard bounces, i.e. a blocked email address or an address that is no longer active, the email address should automatically be removed from the list. Continually trying to send to a hard bounced email address will get you noticed by the ISP as a spammer and may result in your becoming blocked from every email address for the entire ISP.
3. Send frequency: Although you may deem your email relevant and your subscribers have opted in, if you send your emails too often your subscribers may become tired of receiving constant messages from you, which may result in you being marked as spam. If you have a lot of content that you want to send to your readers, consider a multi list strategy. Create multiple lists for your email content. Have your recipients subscribe to each of the lists for which they want to receive content for. That way, you are not blanket emailing the entire list, instead you are being specific about who you are sending your messages to.

Further Reading

• Beamond Creative article:
  10 Tips for a Successful Email Campaign and an Increased Open-Rate:
  http://www.beamondcreative.com/2009/10/enewsletter-marketing-10-tips-for-a-successful-campaign-and-increased-open-rate/
• Yahoo best practices:
  http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/basics/postmaster-15.html
• SPAM test tool:
  http://spamcheck.sitesell.com/
• Wikipedia definition of email SPAM:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spam
• Blacklisted IP verification:
  Check your IP address against these verification services to see if your IP address is blacklisted. There are many more, but these are some of the more renowned services.
  http://www.spamcop.net/bl.shtml
  http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/
  http://www.mail-abuse.com/cgi-bin/lookup