Avoid spam reports and filters

There is a fine line between advertising and spam and unfortunately, many business owners do not understand the difference between the two. This is important because while a clever, well-planted Internet marketing campaign can help to attract new customers and keep existing customers loyal, spam is likely to alienate both new customers and existing ones. This can be extremely damaging to the growth of the business. 

This article will show you some simple tips to avoid your emails going to the spam folder, or even worse, being reported as spam.


What is a spam email?

A spam email is an email promoting a product or service sent to a person that doesn't know about you or has not opted-in for received these ads from your organization. The receiving addresses in spam campaigns are generally acquired in somewhat unethical ways, like scrapping the web for email addresses from social media profiles that provide a public email, from a database breach that leaked an email list, or even from buying email leads from other businesses.


The dangers of spam email campaigns.

Sending spam emails without trying to establish a trusting relationship between you and the receivers of these emails can cause much more harm to your business than it does good. 

Sending bulk spam emails will most likely lead to a lot of spam reports, this will lead to your domain or IP address getting blacklisted by organizations like internet service providers (ISPs), free mailbox providers, and anti-spam vendors which means that your future emails will be blocked by this organizations form entering their system thus not received by the email addresses that they manage.


How to avoid spam reports?

The safest and most legitimate way to avoid spam reports is to build your own list of opted-in customers (meaning customers that have agreed to join your email list and receive your emails). But this offers some limitations to how you can use email marketing to grow your business, so we will discuss later a strategy to send emails to email addresses that have not opted-in to receive these emails without getting reported.


Include your contact information in the signature line.

Including this information will make your email look much more professional and authentic. It will also add more authority to your brand in the eyes of the reader, because a scammer that sends spam will try to hide his information, and the readers seeing you do the opposite (provide your contact information in the email) will add much more to your credibility.


Use a clear and concise subject line.

The reader should be able to know the subject of your email from its subject line alone. You shouldn't try to mislead the reader into opening your email just to find that the purpose of the email is completely different from the subject line. This is a huge red flag for the reader that would believe that your email is sketchy and might unsubscribe from your mailing list or even report your email as spam.


State why has the reader received your email.

The reader might forget about your brand although they could have opted-in to receive emails from you, so they would report your email as spam anyways.

To avoid this, you can state the reason the reader has received your email in the footer of the email. For example, you can write "This is not a spam email, you've received this email because you've ...".


Remind the reader that they can unsubscribe at any time.

When the reader realizes that they can just unsubscribe and not read from you again, they might just unsubscribe but that would reduce the likelihood of the reader reporting your email as spam.


A workaround for sending marketing emails to strangers without getting reported as spam.

In this strategy, we will discuss how to turn strangers into customers through email marketing. When you acquire a stranger's email address without them opting in, you shouldn't send them ads right away. 

First, send them an email to introduce yourself and your business and state how opting in to receive emails from you will help them in the future, and tell them that they will never hear anything from you again if they don't opt in.

You can also offer them something for free like an ebook (You don't have to write it, we will discuss this in a later step) if they provide you their email address, although you already have it, by offering it to you they will be opted-in customers.


A Funnel for free offering in exchange for email addresses.

This can be easily done for free with System.io. Its free version will allow you to create up to three funnels and you can upgrade anytime. You can read my step-by-step tutorial on creating funnels with Systeme IO here.


How to avoid spam filters?

Avoiding triggering spam filters is a point that we have to pay attention to when writing any email. Because all of the time and effort that we've put into our email campaign would go to waste if the emails go to the spam folders of the recipients

.

What are spam filters?

Spam filters are set up by Internet Service Providers (ESPs)  to prevent their subscribers from getting improper and bad-quality emails. They would arrive at your essential inbox on the off chance that spam filters were not set up, demolishing the email insight for everybody. Although spam filters result in some limitations to email marketers, they do more good to email marketing, because without them not this many people would be using email as much as they do today if they received spam emails on the regular.


Check for grammar and spelling errors.

However, if your email contains grammar or spelling errors the spam filters will likely detect your email as spam. Use Grammarly for free to make sure you don't have any of these errors.


Avoid using words that trigger spam filters.

The use of sketchy words like "Win", "Free", "limited time offer", ...etc, are considered spam filters trigger words. The use of these words might send your email to the spam folder automatically even if you have followed all of the other rules.

So keep what you write in your email authentic and overcome the temptation of using these words from the false belief that they will help your business because they will surely do more harm than good.



Conclusion

It's always advised to only send ads to opt-in receivers in your email list, but using the strategies discussed in this article you can turn strangers into opt-in receivers in your email list that can become life-long customers and you don't have to worry about spam reports from their side.