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
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…
You will undoubtedly lose some interested subscribers this way who forget to confirm their email, which is unfortunate, but there are steeper consequences to consider if you don’t confirm their email address…
The bigger picture
Some people, in order to build their lists faster, prefer not to use double opt-in methods. These people simply may not understand the consequences of being tagged as spam.
You might wonder what the big deal is if you get a couple spam complaints–so you lose a few subscribers but you get to keep a lot more. Right?
There’s more to it that that. When the email service providers get involved then your entire email marketing efforts are undermined. Read more here: How to Avoid the Spam Filters