How Not to Look Like a Spammer When Sending Emails - TSTS

Have you ever sent an email to a client only to have it “lost?” Missing emails can cause delays that hurt your business and make it difficult for you to properly communicate with those outside your organization.

A common occurrence is to find out that at first the recipient thought they never received your email, but later they find out it was treated as spam and is in a junk folder.

Email is also a big part of digital marketing and it’s one of the channels with the best Return on Investment (ROI). But that ROI can be impacted if your marketing emails are getting treated as spam and never delivered to recipients’ inboxes.

Why do legitimate emails get treated as spam and rejected? There are two main reasons your email might be getting shunned by a mail filter.

You Have too Many “Spam Signals” in the Email

One of the most common reasons for legitimate emails being sent to junk mail folders is because your email has too many “spam signals” that filters use to look for messages that might be considered unwanted.

Systems designed to filter email use an algorithm to create a score to detect spam. If your score is too high, the recipient’s system will reject it. We’ll get into the things that can cause a high spam score in a moment.

If the email you sent has a bad score, only that email will be rejected, while others will pass through, as well as messages from others in your organization.

Your IP Address is Blacklisted

Blacklisting also will cause rejection. In this case, something has happened to cause the IP address from which you send email to get a bad reputation. The IP address your email is sent from is usually provided by your web host.

In the case of blacklisting, all emails from the sending domain would be rejected, not just a specific message.

Reasons for IP blacklisting include:

Sending email campaigns that get multiple abuse/spam reports.
When a server is taken over, and the attackers use it for phishing or spam.
If you happen to get issued an IP address from a provider that already has a bad reputation.

You want to make sure you have configuration safeguards on the server that handles your email to keep out potential hackers that can ruin your IP reputation in a matter of hours.

If this happens, it’s a long process to get your IP address cleaned up. It includes contacting multiple email services and providing proof that your server issue has been fixed and you’re not sending out spam or phishing emails.

Things to Avoid So Your Emails Aren’t Treated Like Spam

Here are the things to avoid in your company emails so you’re not seen as a spammer by all those mail filters out there.

It’s important to not only avoid these triggers in the main body of your email but also the subject line. 69% of email recipients report email as spam based solely on the subject line of the message.

Avoid Spam Trigger Words

Using words like money, free, etc. all have some “triggers” that rank high for spam. Other words that are often used by systems to detect spam include:

#1
100% free
Best price
Additional income
Earn extra cash
Free refund
Giveaway
Satisfaction guaranteed
Miracle
Incredible deal
And many more

Here’s a list that has 188 words that rank high or get you thrown out as a potential spammer. Even very short sentences get you scored high as a likely bad guy.

Don’t Use All Caps

Another trigger is if you use all caps in an email subject line or within the message. People generally don’t like getting all-caps messages anyhow because it’s the internet equivalent of yelling.

Don’t Use Too Many Graphics

Most marketing emails will include some graphics in the design, and a few is okay. The filters are mainly looking at the balance of text to images. If you use too many images and not enough text, it can give you a higher spam score.

Stay Away from Too Many Links in Your Email & Signature

Using multiple links in a message is another thing that will get an email flagged as spam. This is another example of a few being okay but don’t go overboard.

One way that companies often get dinged by this is through a signature. Their email signature may already contain several links, for example, if they’re adding icons and links to social media.

Keep links in signatures to just one if you can so you’re not already setting an email up to be triggered as spam before you even add any content.

Don’t Use Too Many Exclamation Points

Multiple exclamation points are another thing to avoid if you don’t want your message to be seen as spammy.

Get Help With Impactful Digital Marketing

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