The spam filter and detection protocols that email inboxes have in place protect against malicious and fraudulent emails that could potentially cause harm. They also keep from cluttering the inbox with meaningless content.

If you are a business trying to reach out to your customer base using email delivery systems, you could run the risk of being marked as spam by the protocols protecting their inbox. This means your marketing campaign won’t be as effective as it could potentially be in reaching your customers if it’s not making it to their inbox.

To ensure that you are reaching your customers, you’ll want to make sure to take measures that will allow your emails to avoid being categorised as spam. Here are some effective means that you can employ to keep your marketing material from going into the wrong folder.

Remove Bad Addresses From Your Mailing Lists

If you continually send emails to those in your list that are no longer valid addresses, you run the risk of your email service provider determining that you are not a legitimate sender. In short, you run the risk of being deemed as a spam sender if you ‘blast out’ campaigns to your mailing list when it contains a high percentage of invalid email addresses.

You also run the risk of sending those emails to what is known as spam traps, if you are unsure of where the addresses have come from. Spam traps are email addresses used by Internet Service Provides and blocklist operators to identify senders who aren’t following email best practices. If you send emails to those addresses, you could increase your bounce-rate (when emails cannot be delivered to email addresses).

Segment Your Audience 

Segmenting your audience is a proven method to raise engagement with email campaigns. By specifically targeting those who have shown interest in specific aspects of the product, you raise the engagement rate and click-throughs. By filtering out the recipients that never open your emails, you raise the integrity of your lists and the engagement rates. You can do this by updating the fields for actions such as last open, the last clicked, first and last sent.

If your audience is no longer interested in receiving your emails, providing them with an opt-out option will assist in keeping your lists clean.

Authentication

Make sure that your email service provider assists you with authenticating your email, as this will assist you in not getting marked outright as spam. It provides a way to verify that an email comes from who it claims to be from. Email authentication is most often used to block harmful or fraudulent uses of email such as phishing and spam.