How to Not Get 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.
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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!
Confirm their email
As described in the Email Marketing that Pays video, 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.
Update: To double opt-in or not to double opt-in?
While monitoring my subscription rate, I’ve noted that over time between 25%~30% of my subscribers don’t opt-in to my email list.
Undoubtedly some of these are fake emails or email accounts set up as “junk accounts” (you know what I’m talking about–those spam magnet email addresses we each have that we give out to anybody who wants our email that we don’t want to hear from, and the last time we checked that account it had 26,732 unread messages in it–yeah, that’s the one).
So upwards of 1/3 of people submitting their information to my site weren’t confirming, so I’ve got an ongoing experiment happening on my site where I’m splitting half my sign-ups to a double opt-in list and half to a list they’re automatically added into (no confirmation email).
I’m monitoring the open rates, spam complaints, and click-through percentages on both lists, and you can ask me for an update on them at any time on my daily conference call (get access to my conference call here). You can ask me anything else you want on that call too. I know you’ve got questions nobody’s giving you straight answers to…