How to Help Your Mails Avoid the Spam Box

Building Your Mailing Lists

The first rule of email marketing is to ensure that you have permission to email the individual subscribers on your list.
Second, never buy a list of email addresses, not only is it a sure fire way to up your spam rating but in some countries, it is illegal and can garner you some hefty fines.
To gather subscribers for a list you’ll need on opt-in form properly set up to capture the details correctly. Otherwise, make use of an offline method of gathering emails, such as a competition or gathering emails from customers visiting your business. Be sure to inform your customers that they are consenting to receive your marketing emails.
Don’t manually enter email addresses you get from business cards or work correspondence, it violates anti-spam laws in places around the globe. However, you can and should send them a lead mailer giving them the chance to sign up, But after each send clean out your leads list.

Regularly Clean Up Your Mailing lists

Your lists need constant maintenance to be kept healthy. Over time people will naturally unsubscribe from mailing lists but more people who no longer want to see your content will more just ignore the mails as they come in, instead of unsubscribing. Now, most would think this isn’t an issue but it is.
Large webmail providers have stated that they look at how many emails are opened and how many are deleted without being opened as a factor in their spam filtering decisions.
Be proactive remove these inactive addresses. All lists experience turnover and gain and lose subscribers in a cyclical way. Don’t take it personally when you see losses. Remove the unengaged users to help boost your delivery rates.

Your E-Mail Domain Reputation

Your e-mail domain (address your email is sent from) has a reputation associated with it. This reputation is incredibly important. If it drops to low or one of your mails lands in a spam-trap you could find your domain blacklisted. Unfortunately, no matter how careful you are there is no 100% guarantee to avoid landing up on a blacklist. (Here is a good article about the best SPAM blacklist sites to check - https://www.mailgun.com/blog/best-dns-blacklist-not-all-created-equal)
You can reduce the chances of being blacklisted by cleaning up your mailing list and using address validation to protect against spam addresses and spelling mistakes in the e-mail addresses. But keep an eye on your delivery metrics may be the best way to see that you have been blacklisted.

Track Your Engagement Metrics

Do you know if your mailers paying off?
Are they reaching more people or less? Tracking your engagement metrics are the only way to answer these questions. The first few mailers will establish a baseline that you can then measure your performance against.
These are where you should focus your efforts, but not to the exclusion off all else.
• Open Rates
• Click Through Rates
• Spam Complaints

If you see a negative trend developing it’s not the end of the world as long as you take steps to remedy the situation as soon as you find it.

2 Notes On Your Mailers

These are just a few quick notes on mailers to help with engagement mailers.
• Make sure your Content is relevant and valuable
Be sure that your content makes sense. Are you overloading your reader with too much info? Does the info in your mailer click through to relevant info on your site?
• Avoid Click bait subject lines
Click bait subject lines that barely match your content are the fastest route to unsubscribes and spam complaints.

In The End

At the end of the day, it comes down the realization that your mailers are part of an ongoing process. You need to send mails regularly and make sure to keep your systems neat and tidy. All of these will help keep your mailers from the spam box.