5 Tips on How to Keep Your Emails Out of Spam
When it comes to cold email outreach, also known as direct email marketing, it’s important to consider the multitude of issues that can sabotage your campaign and reduce the odds of landing a deal with the desired prospect, and spam is one of the biggest obstacles you will have to overcome. This article will outline 5 professional cold outreach techniques that you should be using if you want to avoid getting into spam.
Spam Filters
Unfortunately, email deliverability is not an exact science, which can be frustrating even for seasoned email marketing specialists. It’s not that hard to end up in the email spam folder for any number of reasons, but there are a few tried-and-true tricks that can help you avoid getting there in the first place.
Spammers have been the bane of our lives since emails first came out. So, as much as we dislike the fact that our messages are going to spam, we also have to take a second to appreciate why spam filters exist and the value they bring.
In the battle against spammers, there are 3 primary entities involved:
They develop rules to screen out suspicious activity on the network. Their security measures and protocols apply to spammers as well. For example, ISPs collect DNS-based Blacklists, by which they automatically check senders. If the system finds the IP in the Blacklist, it does not allow incoming messages from this address.
The most popular these days are Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo. Depending on the reliability of the service, the level of its spam protection will differ. Generally, sophisticated services have multiple spam filters with different algorithms. The most well-known example is a spam trigger words filter, allowing email messages containing forbidden phrases or symbols.
Violation of the norms leads to criminal liability and penalties. The laws apply to personal information theft, phishing activities, user data collection without permission, and others. The CAN-SPAM Act, for instance, protects Americans from spam. Alternatively, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy in the European Union and the European Economic Area.
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Avoiding Spam
Parties from all over the globe come together in their own ways to combat spammers and scammers at every corner of the internet. Undoubtedly, this kind of cooperation leads to a safer user experience, however, spam filters and traps sometimes catch innocent email marketers who simply want to communicate with their potential customers and clients.
Keeping high deliverability rates is no easy task. Using the information below, you should be able to substantially increase the odds of avoiding spam. Apply these practices to your current processes and see instant results and optimization.
1.Choosing a Reliable Sender’s Address
The sender’s email address must be recognizable when sending someone an email. And if this is a nurturing campaign, it should include a brand name. Messages from an unknown address with a common name are more likely to go to spam. When you send emails, don’t use an address with numbers or include “noreply” before the domain name. It’s best to assign a brand name to the address and specify the sender’s name. Emails that are sent without an appropriate address receive penalties.
2. Checking the Domain Block List (DBL)
Blacklists are formed from IP addresses and domains detected in spamming. When a sender gets a bad reputation, their IP is banned, and their messages aren’t sent to recipients. You can check whether or not your IP has been blacklisted using a variety of tools.
3. Understanding Your Email Service Provider
The ESP you choose will play a huge role in determining your success in getting emails delivered. Highly trusted ESPs (recipient) often block messages from untested, unknown, or disreputable ESPs (sender). If your ESP is recognized as reliable and protected, your emails are more likely to get delivered. The most popular ESPs, mentioned above are also some of the most reputable ones.
4. Buying Certification
To increase recipient trust in your emails, you can buy S/MIME certificates for your single email address or multiple company addresses. After adding the certificate to your email software, your emails will be encrypted and digitally signed, optimizing results because a reputable organization will verify your address. For example, SSL.com provides Personal Basic Certificates for $49 a year.
5. Manual Spam Testing
Before sending out emails for an outreach campaign, you should always check the “spamminess”. You can test it with a particular service that simulates spam filter algorithms and tests emails according to specific criteria. One of these services is ISNOTSPAM.com. Before sending an email, you can see an online report that gives you the probability that your message will pass through the recipient's ESP spam filters.
Conclusion
When it comes to direct email marketing, staying out of spam is crucial. Even the most successful companies face the threat of spam filtering. If you want results, you need to stay up to date on trends, tips and tricks, and the latest tools used for high-level direct outreach via cold email campaigns. Also, let’s not forget that your subscribers can mark your messages as spam even after they receive them, usually because they don’t like or care about what they see in the email itself, and any emails sent after that won’t be read.