Tired of Fighting the SPAM Filtering War?

It is frustrating when you are waiting for an email to

• Send a response to reset a password
• Get instructions for a website form
• Receive a picture
• Verify a purchase
• Waiting from a note from a friend that you know it was sent to you at least twice and never received

Unless you remember to check your email SPAM filter, you may miss that email, the one you’ve been waiting for all day.  

If that has happened to you, and I’m 99.99% sure it has, have you thought about the emails you send as a Digital Marketer?  Are your messages dumped in your recipients SPAM folder more often than not?  Is this the reason your email stats are low because your list member never knows there’s a new email from you – they never looked in the SPAM folder and never moved it to their inbox to read?

Tired of fighting the SPAM filtering war?
It’s becoming more difficult. Because the fact is, most of the email sent is SPAM and most email belongs in the SPAM folder.
But your emails are not SPAM, they belong in the Inbox. 

Here are a few steps to get them to the right place:

Email authentication and validation came up on the radar of the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) who developed RFC protocols (aka Request for Comments) for email authentication guidelines like SPF and RFC 7208.  This evolved, and then there is DKIM, and DMARC.
These systems help with decrease SPAM somewhat, but nowhere close to what is really needed. 
In addition to having your email authenticated with SPF and validated with DKIM and DMARC with your ESP, you can send a personal email to your recipients to ask them to white-list your sending domain.
Ideally ask your recipients to add your “FROM” address to their contact list or in some cases called the safe senders list.  With whitelisting it is imperative the Marketer use the same FROM address in each mailing

Consider asking your list member to add your FROM address in your welcome letter.

Use dynamic content to link to whitelist instructions in your confirmation letter:  which maybe different depending on the email client they use.
SPAM filtering systems and services such as Barracuda SPAM Firewall and Mimecast, designed o stop SPAM may also stop your emails too.  Barracuda is “an integrated hardware and software solution designed to protect email from SPAM, viruses, spoofing, phishing and spyware.”   Generally these systems get it right, however on occasion when the filter is aggressive with the settings, legitimate emails may be marked as SPAM.  Your ESP can straighten it out with these services.
When legitimate emails are marked as SPAM, some may bounce back to your ESP.  Evaluate your email bounces.  Your bounce report should give you the “why” something bounced, allowing you to investigate and hopefully correct the errors.

Be CAN SPAM compliant.

In conclusion, you cannot control your recipient’s ESP spam traps. However you do have control over elements that lead your domain or email being branded as a SPAMMER.   If you have additional questions about SPAM and the inbox drop us a line.  help@dundee.net