4 Reasons Your Emails are Marked as Spam – How to Prevent Email Spam

by | Aug 22, 2013

How can you prevent email spam?  Being reported as a “Spammer” is serious.  It can easily damage your sales automation efforts.  Even if you are legitimate in your email automation efforts, if you send enough emails…you will eventually be reported.

Since the remedy to a report of spam involves suffering through a “guilty until proven innocent” process, you want to do everything in your power to avoid the experience.  When it does happen, quickly respond to any report and work with your email provider to resolve it quickly.

Why Does it Happen???

    • Recipient Mistakes: Sometimes an inexperienced user will hit the wrong button.  Instead of simply unsubscribing, they will hit a button like “report abuse” or “mark as spam”.  They are simply trying to communicate that they think the email is unwelcome or “junk”.  Instead, they send a spam alert.
    • Sender is forgotten:  When a marketer collects emails legitimately, such using an opt-in form on their site, if they don’t send emails rapidly and consistently, the recipient will not remember opting in.
    • Customer is transaction oriented:  You may have thousands of email addresses of customers that have purchased from you in the past.  If you don’t have marketing automation in place at the time of purchase, the customers may not feel they have given permission to send emails.  Anytime you begin an email campaign to a new group of recipients, ask for permission.
    • Business card collection:  At trade shows and local network events, marketers will collect business cards of the people they meet.  Armed with a fist full of these information sources, the marketer will place these new acquaintances on their standard mailing list and begin sending full blown newsletters and promotions.  Good marketers will have a standard template in the CRM for these new prospects that is an “invitation” to join the mailing list.

Ways to Prevent Email Spam Reporting

  • Make your unsubscribe link highly visible:  Some marketers have the mistaken notion that hiding the opt-out link will keep their email lists strong.  Consider putting the “unsubscribe” link prominently at the top of the email.  This is a much better alternative than the “spam” button provided by the email server.
  • Professional looking emails:  Use the templates provided by your email marketing service to create professional looking emails.  You don’t want to look like a scammer phishing for information.  If the email does not look professional, the recipient may be skeptical about using your “unsubscribe” button.
  • Set expectations:  When someone agrees to opt-in to your list, they deserve to know what you will be sending them.  For example, if they sign up for a monthly newsletter and begin getting promotions each week, they will feel spammed.  It’s best to have segmented lists with opt-in choices.  Let the recipient choose whether they want a soft-sell, informative newsletter or a hard-sell, bargain-focused promotion.  Don’t combine those lists.

Two Resources for Email Spam Issues

Being accused of spamming is awful.  It is time consuming to resolve and it can be very difficult to recover your status.  To learn more about different abuse reporting services:

  • SpamCop.net:  The “blackhole list” here is kind of like the FBI Most Wanted list.  If you get on, email servers will block you all around the world.  However, they are known for listening to reason to resolve your issues.
  • Abuse.net: This network abuse clearing house – not the network police.  The site allows you to look up contact information and forwards messages to the system managers that can resolve the issues.