For most of the companies that send mass e-mails to their clients, delivering e-mails to inbox folder is a painful process. As spammers always develop new techniques to bypass spam filters, the spam filters update their methods and criterias frequently to deny them or place their e-mails into junk folder. In this article, I am going to try to explain what steps you should take to bypass these filters and get your e-mails to be delivered to your clients’ inboxes.
1 – Optimize Your E-mails
Beleive or not, some of the companies still prepare their newsletters in MS Word and use that HTML in their e-mails. This HTML unnecessarily complex and is not compatitable with the standards. The filters try to analyze your e-mails and detect if it’s content is really valuable for the receiver. So when your HTML is too complex and out of the standards, the spam filters may not be able to read most of the content and can categorize your e-mail as spam.
Another thing to do is to adjust the image / text ratio. Having the e-mail without any text or any images would increase the chance that your e-mail to be detected as spam. Also you should not use a single, large image. Divide your image to 3-4 parts. Do not use a very crowded text and use a text that is releated to the images.
Also your e-mail subject should not be too short or too long. Do not use too large or too tiny fonts. Actually, there are so many criterias employed by spam filters that you should be careful about. For Example, you can view the famous Spam Assassin criterias from this link.
Finally if you cannot spare any time to modify your e-mail structure, you can get help from companies like EmailCraft.
2 – Send the E-mail to People Who Really Want It
One of the most important things to do is to have an easy unsubscription process – with one click using single link if possible.
Nearly all of the e-mail providers use their users’ feedback to detect a spam mail. Take Gmail for example. If Gmail detects that 50000 e-mails are sent by a single e-mail address, it allows all users to see it. And if let’s say 250 of 1000 users seeing it report it as spam, Gmail says “this is good enough for me” and deletes the e-mail from the other 49000 users’ inboxes before they even notice. And at this point unsubscribe processes get important. Because if your e-mail has an unsubscribe link, the user may choose to unsubscribe from your mailing list instead of marking your e- mail as junk or reporting spam.
Unsubscribe Instantly and Keep Process Simple
When the user clicks your unsubscribe link, instantly unsubscribe user if possible and try not to send any more e-mails to the user for that newsletter again. Don’t even ask the user to login and don’t ask “Are you sure” question. Instead of “Are you sure” question put another link that would reverse the unsubscribe process in case user accidentally clicks the link in your mail.
In addition, Gmail has a feature. When a user clicks “Report Spam”, if Gmail is thinks that the sender is not a spammer but a regular mass e-mailer, it shows up a modal pop-up which has 3 options: “Report Spam and Unsubscribe”, “Report Spam” and “Cancel”. If the user clicks “Report Spam and Unsubscribe” and your e-mail contains the necessary header information for unsubscribe process, Gmail sends you the info to unsubscribe the user from your mailing list.
Finally, have a disclaimer link to your website in your e-mail. This can help the user to get information about your company and convince the user that your e-mail is not a spam. Doing this can also help you get whitelisted or prevent you from being blacklisted.
3 – Don’t Share Your Mailserver
Increasing your IP Reputation must be one of your main objectives if you want to stay out of junk folders. If your company shares a mail server with other companies there is a high probability that all the other efforts you make to increase your IP Reputation can go to garbage. The company(ies) you share your server can be a spammer or a mass e-mailer that doesn’t care about the quality of their e-mails or they just might not know what to do to increase their e-mail quality. You can even be blacklisted just because you are on the same IP with a spammer. So, get yourself a private mail server and IP address.
4 – Seperate Your IP Addresses
As written above, IP Reputation is very important. If your company sends different types of e-mails to the customers, you should consider Seperating your IP Addresses. For example, from one of your mail addresses you send invoices and from another, you send campaign or newsletter e-mails. The newsletter e-mails have a higher chance that they will be reported as spam by the users. So, it is a good idea to seperate IP address of different e-mail addresses you are sending e-mail from. At least you can group your e-mails by type and use different IP addresses for different types of e-mails. This way, when 5 of your 100 newsletter e-mails are reported as spam, only the reputation of a single IP (which is newsletter IP) will be effected. One more benefit of this action is that your company’s own employee mails will not be detected as spam this way.
5 – FBL, JMRP, SenderId and DKIM Registerations
Most of your clients’ e-mail addresses will be on huge mail providers like Gmail, AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, MSN and Windows Live. Join their feedback loop programs. Gmail does not have a feedback program but Yahoo has Feedback Loop (FBL) and Microsoft Providers (Hotmail, Live, WindowsLive, MSN etc.) have Junk Mail Reporting Program (JMRP). These registrations will inform you when a user reports your e-mail as spam and so, you will have some nice information. But remember, joining these programs never guarantees that your e-mails will be delivered to inbox. The only intend to give you valueable feedback so you can improve yourself in sending bulk e-mails.
Here is a nice article on what will happen in the registeration process of JMRP:
JMRP Registeration Part 1
JMRP Registeration Part 2
Completing Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) and SenderId registeration is also important. DKIM will provide the information that an e-mail is really sent by you. SenderId is a proecedure used by Microsoft Providers to detect if the source of e-mail is secure. Another thing to have is a Reverse DNS (rDNS) record.
6 – Adjust E-mail Sending Frequency
Do not send all e-mails at once. This will instantly alert the mail servers and sometimes, your e-mails can even be blocked. To increase your e-mail delivery rate, queue and send your e-mails over a time span. Also, you may want to keep is time span as large as possible.
7 – Blacklists and Whitelists
Get your IPs out of the blacklists. There are several addresses that you can do this. MXTOOLBOX is one of them but don’t rely on just one. If you find your IP in a blacklist, try to contact them as soon as possible and get your IP removed from there.
Get your IPs inside the whitelists. There are also some whitelists, including AOL whitelist all over the internet that can help you get your IP Reputation higher. Register for them. But remember, getting into whitelists does not make it certain that your e-mails will not be marked as spam.
8 – Don’t Do what Spammers Do
DON’T BE TRICKY! This is what spammers do to bypass the filters. For example never place a header that is not releated with the content of your e-mail, just to create attention. Actually, doing such things will formally make you a spammer. So, don’t be surprised if you quickly get blacklisted because of a similar action.
Spammers also have some common style in their e-mails. For example if you use characters like “!” or ‘#’ frequently or use words like “GUARANTEED” or “VIAGRA” or “FREE” especially in capital letters, there is a high chance that your e-mail can be marked as spam by the filters. Also, you should not use IP addresses in the links you include in your e-mails. If possible, use the same domain with your e-mail.
Again, you can take a look at the Spam Assassin Criterias or other resources to learn about stuff that you shouldn’t do.
9 – Stay Clear of any Spammers in any Channel
Your company is a partner to another company ? Even if your partner company is a larger one, do not include link of that company if you aren’t absolutely sure that they care about e-mails they send just as you do. Containing a link of a spammer in your e-mail can get your e-mail categorized as spam too.
Be careful even about your website. Remove the links of the spammers or other bulk e-mail senders that are in risk of being marked as spam from your website.
10 – Keep Your Mailing Lists Clean
Just to create more attention, I have left the best to last. You shouldn’t send e-mails to the e-mail addresses that do not exist. Doing this will increase the chances that you will be detected as spammers. Since more than %20 of the e-mail addresses change every year, you should keep cleaning up your mailing list constantly. You can buy some tools or write your own tool for that. Analyze the bounce mails and detect the bounces that bounce because of reasons like “Unknown User” or “User Not Found”. Especially detect bounce mails with SMTP 550 response and remove them from your lists.
Conclusion
Sending mass e-mails without being marked as spam is something that most of the companies fail to do so and these steps I tried to describe will help you to achieve it. Following these steps can help you a lot on this purpose but never make it certain that your mails will be delivered to inbox. And there is one thing you have to remember: the spammers always find new methods and spam filters follow them closely so, the filter criterias always change. This means that you always have to follow the filters and get adapted to their new methods of detecting spam e-mails if you want your e-mails to be delivered to inbox.
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Tags: Delivery to Inbox, DKIM, E-mail, E-mail Marketing, Gmail, Hotmail, IP Reputation, Microsoft, Sender Id, Spam, Spam Assassin, Spam Filters, Spam Mail, Yahoo
