How to Avoid Getting Marked as Spam
There are two ways to get marked as spam–one way is by the people you send your emails to and the other is by the mail services themselves. You need to be aware of both of them to get your messages delivered and read.
The spam button
The thing that immediately comes to most people’s minds when it comes to being marked as spam is when your email recipient simply clicks the “mark as spam” button.
Email users can be kind of careless when it comes to hitting the spam button, but there are a few things you can do to greatly reduce getting your email marked as spam.
Valuable content
First of all, sending out valuable and relevant content will cut down on spam complaints more than anything else. Even if somebody asked to receive emails from you previously, if you send them useless content people will penalize you with spam complaints.
Email them often
If you send out quality content, you’ll want to do so as often as you can.
If you stop sending emails to your list for a couple months then people may not recognize you when you start again, and into the spam bucket you go!
How often you want to email them will vary depending on your business, and I’ll have another tutorial to guide you on that topic in the future. Join my email list if you’d like info on that when it comes out.
Confirm their email
Requiring that people go to their email and click a link to verify their email address will ensure that the person wants to hear from you.
If you don’t do this you may get people entering in other people’s email addresses, and those other people will mark you as spam when you suddenly start sending them email.
I’ve heard that one of the meanest email pranks you can pull on someone is to submit their email address to a certain “Klingon Email Group” (“Klingon” being an alien race in the “Star Trek” fictional universe), and if someone wants to be properly removed from that email list they have to submit a request to be removed using the Klingon language (yes, the Klingons have their own real language–there’s even a nonprofit “Klingon Language Institute”). How would you like someone else to submit your email to that list?
Well, that was way off topic…
The down side is you will undoubtedly lose some interested subscribers this way who forget to confirm their email.
To double opt-in or not to double opt-in?
I’m currently monitoring the sign-up rates, the open rates, spam complaints, click-through percentages, and sales rates on two email lists that are identical in every way except that one is a double opt-in list and the other is single opt-in. I’ll write tutorials on this topic when I have hard data. Join my email list if you’d like that info when it comes out.
