Summary
Whether for an e-mail, a newsletter or an e-mailing campaign, the key to success in terms of deliverability is rigorous monitoring of KPIs. These performance indicators enable you not only to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns, but also to anticipate and correct any shortcomings before they damage your results.
These metrics will give you an overview of the health of your campaigns, enabling you to identify and correct errors before they harm your deliverability rate.
Understanding spam and anti-spam filters
Spam is basically just unsolicited email sent in bulk that often seems irrelevant to the recipient. Spam can take different forms. It might be unwanted advertising or fraudulent messages, like phishing attempts or the distribution of computer viruses.
Let’s say you bought a list of email addresses from a company that specializes in such things. At first glance, this list seems perfect for your company. You think it would be great to contact them by email to tell them about your business and what you do. But since these persons haven’t given you permission to contact them by email, sending this message would be considered spam.
Why is your email identified as spam?
According to ReturnPath, almost 21% of e-mails sent by professionals end up in the spam folder, even if they are legitimate. There are two main reasons for this:
However, sometimes perfectly legitimate e-mails are nevertheless considered spam. This can be the case even if your communication is relevant and requested by the recipient. So, how do these filters actually work, and how can you make sure your e-mails get through?
How does an anti-spam filter work?
The thing with spam filters is that they look at a whole load of different things to work out whether an email is unwanted. Every email that comes in gets checked. They look at all the different ways emails are sent out and group them together, just like spammers do. Once an email gets a certain score, it’s marked as spam and sent straight to the spam folder.
As soon as an email’s score exceeds a certain threshold, it is considered spam and placed directly in the spam folder.
These anti-spam filters are specific to each e-mail service: for example, an e-mail may pass the Yahoo anti-spam filter, but be rejected by the Google anti-spam filter. This is because all servers individually determine their list of criteria for considering an e-mail as spam. The list of criteria is constantly evolving, but there are some important ones to bear in mind:
Are you experiencing spam problems with your email marketing campaigns? Our team of MailSoar experts can help you solve your deliverability problems.
How can you prevent your emails from ending up in spam?
We’ve put together a few tips and tricks for avoiding spamming in your next email marketing campaign.
Use a secure e-mail platform
To send out your various email campaigns, don’t use your classic email software such as Gmail, Outlook or Yahoo. These services, although very efficient, are not adapted to email marketing. What’s more, when you use them, you’ll often be limited not only by the options (unsubscribe link, KPI and ROI measurement, etc.) but also by the number of daily mailings.
We advise you to use reliable and secure e-mail services such as MailChimp, SendingBlue, FlowMailer or any other dedicated e-mail software with a good deliverability score to increase your chances of reaching the main inbox.
As an anecdote, one of our customers used to use Gmail before calling on us to send these emails. Since he stopped using it, the deliverability of his email campaigns has increased by over 300%! Discover their success story here!
Work on your email subject line
Since the subject line is one of the first things we see in our e-mail inboxes, it’s important to get it right. First and foremost, it plays a very important role in the open rate of your communications, but anti-spam filters are also particularly attentive to it.
So it’s very important to take care of it and avoid certain practices as much as possible to avoid increasing your score and ending up in spam.
Don’t overuse capital letters, exclamation marks or any other special characters that will land your e-mail directly in spam.
Watch out for Spamwords, which are words that are almost directly associated with spam. These include the words Win, Urgent, Offered, Winner, Promotion and so on. In themselves, these are generally attractive words, but they can be associated with scams and therefore with spam.
Clearly state who you are
To avoid alerting spam filters, it’s first and foremost important to keep as close as possible to the same e-mail address. This will enable your recipients to clearly know who you are and recognize your sender name, and so avoid being flagged as spam, but it will also improve the reputation of your address. This last point is very important when calculating your filter score.
Maintaining a good image/text ratio
Since anti-spam filters can’t read images, if your e-mail is composed exclusively of images, or contains a lot of them, anti-spam filters will consider you a spammer trying to bypass their control.
You need to find the right balance between text and images to illustrate your message without arousing the suspicions of ISPs. Our experts recommend an average of 60% text and 40% images in your communications.
Dispatching shipments
Spam filters are designed to detect mass mailings and automatically redirect them to the SPAM folder. To get around this problem, it’s best to send your campaigns in several batches. This will also enable you to analyze the schedules that work best with your recipients, while avoiding the dreaded folder!
Adopt the right mailing frequency
If you decide to send your e-mails more frequently, there’s a good chance that ISPs will consider you to be intrusive and redirect your e-mails as spam. But the reverse is also true. If your sending strategy is too spaced out, your recipients are also more likely to mark you as spam, because they won’t remember your name or why they signed up to your mailing list in the first place.
Want to know more about sending frequency? Discover our dedicated article now!
Add an unsubscribe link
The unsubscribe link has been mandatory since 2004 and the CAN-SPAM law of 2003. If you don’t include it in your e-mail campaigns, there’s a good chance that ISPs will penalize you and your domain name will be blacklisted. In this case, all your future campaigns will be considered spam.
What’s more, if you add an unsubscribe link, there’s a good chance that your recipients will unsubscribe on their own without reporting you as spam. So it’s important to highlight this unsubscribe link.
Forgetting attachments
Want to draw the attention of spam filters to yourself? Then start adding attachments to your e-mails now! If you didn’t know, attachments and spam filters aren’t exactly friends. Attachments can contain viruses, for example, and spam filters don’t want that for you.
If you need to add an attachment to an e-mail, we advise you either to add it directly to the body of your e-mail if possible (for photos, graphics, etc.) or to add a download link redirecting to a landing page, for example.
In addition to not being considered spam, your message will be lighter and therefore quicker to open, and you’ll be able to measure the impact of your link more easily via tags or landing page analytics.
Look after your contact list
To ensure good deliverability, you need to remove contacts who have little or no engagement with your campaigns. Although this will reduce your mailing list, it will improve the reputation of your sending domain. Your contact list and the way they interact with your communications have a very important impact on your reputation and the deliverability of your emails. The higher your deliverability, the less likely your e-mail will be considered spam.
In order to respect the interests of your subscribers, OPT-In is essential to ensure that users explicitly consent to receive communications, particularly in the context of e-mail marketing. By choosing the OPT-In option, individuals give their consent voluntarily, often by ticking a box or filling in a specific form.
This approach respects user confidentiality and ensures an informed commitment. To reinforce this approach, double opt-in is used: after initial registration, a confirmation e-mail is sent, requesting further validation. This process ensures that consent is genuine, reducing the risk of unintentional or fraudulent additions to a mailing list.
The importance of constant monitoring to avoid spam filters
On average, 83% of B2B companies use newsletters as part of their content strategy. For 40% of marketers, emailing is considered a crucial tactic for the success of their brand (Monde du mail).
That’s why, more than ever, you need to take into account anti-spam filters, which allow you to identify unwanted email by taking into account various criteria. However, a poorly configured emailing strategy can land your marketing emails in the spam folder even though they are legitimate.
If you need help with your spam and deliverability issues, MailSoar can help you implement the best solution for your marketing objectives. Our team of experts is accustomed to managing deliverability for major senders in all industries.
