What is Spam and How to Avoid Spam Filters?

What is Spam and How to Avoid Spam Filters?

According to Returnpath, only 79% of permissioned email marketing messages reached consumers' inboxes; the remaining 21% of permissionbased emails sent by email marketers end up in junk folders.

What is Spam Email?

Spam email is unsolicited and unwanted junk email sent out in bulk to an indiscriminate recipient list. Spice Send does not promote or encourage email SPAM techniques. Contacts lists are required to be permission-based before you can use them in your account.

Spam Laws The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 became law on January 1, 2004. It has defined the basic requirements for all marketing & bulk emails. If you send commercial email (generally sales or promotional content), you should familiarize yourself with the requirements of CAN-SPAM. 

Never use deceptive headers, From names, reply-to addresses, or subject lines.

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All bulk/marketing emails must provide an unsubscribe link

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You must include your physical mailing address.

Ways to avoid Spam Filters Don't use purchased, rented, or scraped lists Purchased or rented lists don't actually help you grow your business. Infact they lead to high bounce rates and blacklisting. Sending to a list that hasn't given you express permission can impact your ability to market your business, potentially damage your brand, and even result in legal ramifications. Instead, grow your list via ethical practices.

Avoid Spammy content The content of your email can result in an inbound email server sending it to the spam folder. Spam filters look at an email as a whole, with thresholds set for certain criteria. If a threshold is exceeded, the email gets marked as spam.

Things that can be caught by spam filters can include: 

An entire email composed of capital letters

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Frequent, random capitalization

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Excessive punctuation, especially "$" and "!"

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Strange spacing or excessive amounts of blank space

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Poor spelling

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Frequent variations in text color and size

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Scam-like subject lines

Avoid link shorteners Spammers shorten links because they typically don't want anything in the email that can identify their whereabouts, so if a spam filter sees shortened links it's a red flag.

As a marketer, knowing this piece of information is important. After all, using link-shortening tools, like Bitly, is common practice. But, it's important to avoid shortened links in your email.

Authenticate your domain for emails.

Email authentication, also referred to as domain authentication, refers to the process of authenticating the sending origin or domain so that the ISPs can better route your email. In other words, email authentication enables your email marketing service to send emails on your behalf utilizing your own domain reputation.

SpiceSend, a reliable email marketing tool allows its subscribers to completely white-label your domain for emails. This should help you stay out of the spam folder and will greatly improve your email deliverability.

Conclusion While spam is a common problem, knowing how it's detected and sent to unseen folders is less understood. Using the information above, you can create your next campaign with confidence knowing that you've taken precautions to keep your messages out of spam folders.