Do you know that 1 out of 6 emails are caught by popular spam filters or never reach the intended recipient? Whether you send emails in bulk or not, there is a chance you might fall victim to the strict judgment of ISPs and mailbox providers’ anti-spam algorithms. This happens to every company regardless of industry, product, age, or target audience.
The key participants of the email ecosystem have become so strict and severe that it is hard to get through their rigorous scanning process, even for legitimate emails. To make matters worse, they constantly update and reinforce their security measures to match cyber-criminals levels.
However, that does not mean you cannot increase your chances of passing those barriers and delivering the brand message right to the subscriber. Introducing email spam prevention techniques in your email marketing routine might improve the situation.
Importance of Introducing Email Spam Prevention Techniques
No one likes email spam, whether it originated from malicious actors or a negligent company careless about email strategy. People find it annoying, wasting their precious time and money. It might also become a threat as it can trick potential victims into downloading malware or sharing their personal and sensitive data, such as bank accounts and credit card numbers.
Although the conversion rate for spam is low, as fewer people fall for shady emails, but hackers are getting smarter, inventing new ways to deceive users. Therefore, ISPs, mailbox providers, and blacklist vendors regularly improve their safety measures to defend the email ecosystem.
These protective measures do not go unnoticed in the business world, as companies find it harder to prove their honest intentions to ISPs and others. Even legitimate emails may trigger spam filters, end up in the spam folder, or be rejected completely. This leads to numerous drastic outcomes.
First and foremost, it might destroy relationships with consumers. Spamming is considered bad PR for branding. Associated with aggressive marketing tactics, it always pushes away customers as it makes the communication feel intrusive and untrustworthy.
Recipients of spam emails often feel disrespected because their privacy has been violated. This erodes their trust, undermining the company’s reliability and credibility. Over time, audiences become dissatisfied with the company and communication, leading to a lower engagement rate and a higher unsubscribe rate that cannot but negatively affect relationships with the brand.
Second, it might damage the sender’s score and reputation. Spamming your subscribers with commercial emails may destroy not only relationships with customers but also relationships with the key parties of the email ecosystem, such as ISPs, mailbox providers, blacklist vendors, and anti-spam organizations.
As your customers lose faith in your products, connections, and customer relationships, the more legitimate and well-crafted messages will be lumped together with irrelevant spam. The more your emails end up in a spam folder or cause spam complaints, the more suspicious you look for ISPs. You start to see a decline in your hardly-earned sender’s reputation and score as mailbox providers will be skeptical about your correspondence.
Third, it might ruin key email performance, ROI, and revenue. The more your emails raise spam flags and end up in spam folders, the fewer brand messages your customers receive. Ruined sender’s score and low engagement caused by tarnished customer relationships not only see your legitimate messages being ignored completely but also the domain being blacklisted. It dramatically affects email deliverability and consistent delivery of brand messages to the target audience, resulting in missed sales opportunities.
This means the company’s open rates, read rates, click-through rates, and conversions will suffer, dragging down key email performance metrics such as engagement and ROI. The latter is directly related to the company’s revenue and financial potential to grow and strengthen its positioning in the market.
Fourth, it might devastate email channel potential. The ill effects of creating spam emails do not end with a poor sender’s score, low key performance metric, or blacklisting. All those drastic outcomes nullify the company’s efforts in the email channel. As a result, all the company’s investments will be in vain, with the potential for email channels remaining unrealized.
Last but not least, it might cause significant fines and legal issues. If a business sends spam messages, even unintentionally, it risks legal consequences. According to the CAN-SPAM Act, which sets the rules for commercial emails, tough penalties for violations should be applied to those who disobey the laws. Each spam email is subject to penalties of up to $53,088. The law makes no exception for individual commercial messages and business-to-business emails.
So, the importance of introducing email spam prevention techniques into the email marketing routine is paramount. Regardless of industry, product, audience, and size of subscription list, companies must ensure authenticity in communication through legitimate brand messages. Here are the top email spam prevention techniques that every business should adopt.
CAN-SPAM Penalties: Everything You Need to Know
Top Email Spam Prevention Techniques
Here are the top email spam prevention techniques companies may adopt to increase their chances of proving their honest intentions, passing through spam filters, and delivering brand messages to subscribers.
Understand What Is Email Spam
Companies should understand what it means to send spam emails to avoid being seen as spammers by ISPs, mailbox providers, and other key email channel participants. They must grasp all the nuances of looking like spammers, from reasons that trigger spam filters to those that compel customers to leave a spam complaint.
Initially, spam was an unsolicited email message with commercial or advertising intent. At the core, it is a generic digital newsletter that delivers the same information to each subscriber. In the hands of spammers, this message may pose a security threat, as it may contain malicious links or malware that can give cybercriminals access to a user’s device or trick customers into sharing sensitive information.
There are several types of spam emails:
- Commercial advertisements. Many company’s promos fall under this category as they consist of identical advertisement information sent to a bulk of people at once.
- Fake antivirus alerts. Cybercriminals send this typical malicious email to compromise a user’s system by installing malware scripts.
- Phishing scams. At the core of email spoofing lies a digital newsletter that mimics legitimate corporate communications to provoke a response. It might include a famous brand’s visual identity to compel readers to follow their lead.
- Sweepstakes winners. They are emails claiming users have won prizes to urge them to click the link or share personal data.
While fake antivirus alerts and sweepstakes winners are obvious attacks from cyber-criminals, when it comes to commercial advertisements and phishing scams, it is hard to say whether an email is sent by a hacker or a legitimate company that wants to promote its products. Therefore, multiple security measures of ISPs and mailbox providers often catch legitimate businesses as they might look or behave like malicious actors.
Businesses should understand how ISPs, mailbox providers, and anti-spam organizations work. This knowledge helps them to define the right email marketing strategy, avoid decisions that might make an email look unsolicited, and fix faux pas.
ISPs and key parties of email channels that protect the ecosystem have numerous security measures. They check every critical detail of digital correspondence, track the company’s behavior in the channel, and seriously consider user engagement with the brand. They do not disclose their algorithms and criteria but give recommendations for companies on how to stay on the “light” side and avoid their spam filters.
On top of that, they provide updates on their security measures so businesses may adjust their companies to meet their strict requirements. For instance, last year, Google declared that only fully authenticated messages might have a chance to reach the recipient’s inboxes, hinting that companies that want to secure their connection with Gmail users should set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for every email.
Therefore, get acquainted with the latest recommendations and standards of ISPs, mailbox providers, blacklist vendors, and anti-spam organizations. Introduce them in your email marketing routine. To give you a kick-start, here are the reasons that might see you under ISPs and mailbox radar; try to avoid them:
- Low IP, domain reputation, and sender’s score.
- Non-optimized, unresponsive, mobile-unfriendly, and inaccessible email design.
- Irrelevant or pushy content.
- Hectic email sending habits.
- Low deliverability rate and customer engagement.
- Failed authentication.
- Poor company’s history in the channel.
- High bounce rate, spam complaints rate, and unsubscribe rate.
- Blacklisting.
- Violation of CAN-SPAM Act regulations.
Test Email Content Against Spam
Those who know the origin of spam emails and how ISPs detect them understand that email body copy is the most critical aspect of digital correspondence. It is meticulously inspected and analyzed, as it might contain malicious links to trick recipients or infect the computer. Therefore, one of the best email spam prevention techniques for companies that want to look legitimate and continue exploiting the potential of direct outreach is to test email content against spam.
Here are the most popular reasons why your legitimate email body copy might trigger spam filters and look suspicious for ISPs and mailbox providers.
Irrelevant Content
If an email is irrelevant to the subscriber’s current needs, preferences, and expectations, it is unlikely to receive a positive response, reflected in a low open rate, reading rate, and time spent on the email. It might also cause negative reactions when the recipient places the email in the spam folder, registers a spam complaint, or unsubscribes from the mailing list.
All these outcomes are signs for ISPs and mailbox providers that users are not interested in this communication or that companies bombard their subscribers with useless content, cluttering their inboxes and wasting their precious time. Therefore, they halt this correspondence due to its spam-like activity.
Spam Words
Another common reason a legitimate email triggers spam filters is the unintentional use of spam words. They are specific words and word combinations often used by spammers. They are associated with scams, monetary rewards, antivirus alerts, overpromising, and shady things. Here are the most popular examples:
- Act fast!
- Act now
- Apply now
- Buy direct
- Buy today
- Cash
- Clearance
- Claim now
- Claim your prize
- Do not hesitate
- Hurry up
- Expires soon
- Lifetime
- Now only
- No catch
- No gimmicks
- One time only
- Serious money\cash
- Urgent
- 100%
- 100% Satisfaction
- $$$
Pushy Rhetoric
The manipulative language that causes unnecessary pressure on the recipient is among the top reasons ISPs and mailbox protective systems raise red flags. As it misleads the public and urges them to do something they do not want, it could be easily taken as a phishing attack. Therefore, ISPs and mailbox providers expect such emails seriously and might put them in the spam folder by default.
Poor Formatting
Even technical details like formatting may make the email look spammy. Here are some good reasons why.
- First and foremost, it ruins the information hierarchy, confusing and overwhelming readers.
- Second, it undermines readability and overall user experience. For instance, the unhealthy balance between images and context may easily scare away users and leave a bad impression of the interaction.
- Third, it looks like a tactic scammers usually rely on. For instance, cyber-criminals overuse capitalization and special characters to convey urgency.
- Fourth, it breaks visual monotony and distracts the attention of users.
- Finally, it makes the brand look unprofessional.
Link Shorteners and Attachments
While link shorteners may save your precious space in email, they are considered faux pas in legitimate correspondence as they are a popular hacker tactic. The same goes for attachments that usually carry viruses or malware scripts in spam newsletters.
Incorrect Spelling and Grammar
Another common feature of pure spam emails is poorly written text since spam emails are never proofread or checked. They often have incorrect spelling and grammatical mistakes. Therefore, body copies with mistakes always look suspicious to ISPs.
Non-Optimized HTML
A poorly built email structure with non-optimized or glitchy code is also a sign of a malicious newsletter. Cybercriminals do not have time to perfect and optimize digital newsletters as they generate and send them in large numbers.
The Solution
The email body copy may contain many triggers that raise suspicion of ISPs and mailbox providers’ security systems. Therefore, testing it against spam and all these faux pas is crucial. The good news is that you do not need to do that manually. Unspam – a professional email spam checker and deliverability test tool – does all the heavy lifting for you.
Helping thousands of businesses, it knows a thing or two about ensuring your brand message lands in your inbox and reaches its destination. It checks every critical detail of the body copy, including linked images, text, image ratio, font, tags, HTML elements, and spammy language, providing you with a detailed report. It also inspects the subject lines, detects broken links and short URLs, and discloses accessibility issues.
Unspam – email spam checker and deliverability test
Always Authenticate Emails
Starting in 2024, Google requires businesses that send over 5,000 emails to meet its rigorous anti-spam standards. It asks them to not only provide an easy unsubscription option or stay under a reported spam threshold but also authenticate their emails.
Google was not alone in emphasizing authentication last year. Yahoo and Apple highlighted many of the same email authentication requirements to reduce the number of poorly created and useless emails cluttering users’ inboxes. That means email authentication has become fundamental for companies that need to reach subscribers in Gmail, Apple Mail, and Yahoo Mail.
However, this is not the only reason companies should introduce this best practice in their email marketing routine. Authenticating emails comes with numerous benefits. Primarily, it makes digital correspondence look less spammy. As a main tool to prove the legitimacy of the connection, it ensures ISPs, mailbox providers, and anti-spam organizations that a sender legally operates in the channel and guarantees the credibility and validity of a connection. It also builds a trustworthy relationship with subscribers, improves deliverability, and helps ISPs prevent fraud.
To follow this practice, companies are highly recommended to implement popular standards. They are technical protocols that validate the sender and prevent identity theft through high-jackings of your server or IP. They go by the names of DKIM, DMARC, and SPF.
In short, DKIM uses key encryption to verify the sending domain and email content to ensure the message your subscriber receives is the one you sent. SPF is a barrier against spam that authorizes the company’s IP addresses to send emails. DMARC unifies SPF and DKIM mechanisms into a common framework, telling the receiving server what to do when these protocols fail.
This trio underlies a solid foundation for secure and authentic connections with subscribers. Other less popular but valuable security standards, like ARC and BIMI, might empower them.
Obey CAN-SPAM Act
Violating the CAN-SPAM Act is a serious reason for ISPs and mailbox providers to reject the email immediately. Law is the law, and everyone should obey them. If a business neglects the legislative part of the communication, it must be punished, and the consequences could be damaging, from petty fines to imprisonment.
However, the CAN-SPAM Act is often violated. The reason is simple: businesses are not aware of its full content. Many believe adding an unsubscribe link to their emails and introducing double opt-in is enough to follow the law. Unfortunately, the CAN-SPAM Act and similar regulations require much more from companies in practice.
Therefore, one of the best email spam prevention techniques for marketers is thoroughly understanding anti-spam laws and introducing them in their marketing routines. For instance, an unsubscribe link should be present in every email regardless of its intention, whether promo or transactional. Users must give their direct consent to receive not only commercial or informational emails but also behavioral ones. Every type of email the company sends should have the subscriber’s approval. Businesses and entrepreneurs must also add their physical addresses and relevant contact information.
To learn more about the CAN-SPAM Act, please visit their official website.
Conclusion
Even if a company does not practice spamming, it might still look suspicious to ISPs and mailbox providers, with its emails landing in the spam folder or being rejected immediately. Matching the high levels of cybercriminals, anti-spam security measures have become so strict and ruthless these days that even legitimate brand messages from long-established businesses may fail.
No one is immune to that. Companies experience email spam reporting across industries and target audiences. However, there are ways to increase a company’s chances of reaching intended recipients and avoiding stringent filters by proving to ISPs and mailbox providers the legitimacy of the sender and its correspondence.
These ways imply companies introducing email spam prevention techniques in their email marketing routine. The best ones include authenticating emails, obeying the CAN-SPAM Act and similar legislative documents, and testing email content against spam through professional software like Unspam.
