How to avoid being marked as spam?


Avoid Being Marked as Spam

The first step in the email marketing conversion funnel is to have your email delivered to the recipient's inbox. Here how you can do that by avoiding being marked as spam by email clients and spam filters:

  • Ask your users for permission to send them emails in the future. If you are using paid databases, only use those with users opted-in for marketing messages. 
  • It is also recommended to use Double Opt-in technique. This means when users register on your mailing list, they will be sent an email with a link to confirm their subscription.
  • Add an unsubscribe link to all emails and honor the requests you receive from your users.
  • Remove bounced emails from your database. Also allow users to change their email address when their email changes to avoid having too many email bounces.
  • Don’t send email campaigns using the BCC or CC fields. Use an email marketing software that send individual emails to each recipient, one at a time, with their address in the to field.
  • Check your email spam score.Create several test email accounts on Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo and send multiple test emails to them and see if they are marked as spam. 
  • Avoid sending attachments. Some spam filters are triggered with attachments. If you have images in your email campaign, make sure they are hosted on your website rather than attached to the email. Usually a good email marketing software will take care of that.
  • Talk to your hosting company to get your server optimized for mass mailing. This includes several settings you need to have in place to avoid having your emails blocked by spam servers.
  • Periodically check if your domain is blacklisted. You can use this tool to check if your server is blacklisted.
  • Register on prominent email clients as a bulk sender. Here's the link for Yahoo!
  • Read instructions from prominent email clients on how to send emails in bulk. Here are some instructions from Gmail and Hotmail.