You have certainly noticed that some e-mails you receive end up directly in the spam folder. You rarely look at these e-mails, mostly you delete the contents of the spam folder unseen. The same can happen with your newsletters! But why do the e-mails end up in the spam folder, even if they are not spam?
What is spam?
The term "spam emails" (or "junk emails") refers to malicious, unwanted emails that offer no added value to the recipient. The messages are not trustworthy and are often fraudulently motivated. The recipient is to be manipulated and induced to take an action that is advantageous to the sender - e.g. click on a link or disclose confidential data, etc.. Basically, a distinction can be made between two types of spam e-mails:
- Criminally motivated messages
- Unsolicited marketing e-mails.
To ensure that recipients are spared as much as possible, e-mail clients have various spam filters. These recognise spam e-mails, move them to the appropriate folder or delete them immediately. Every e-mail client (such as Web.de, yahoo, etc.) has its own spam filter! Each one works differently, has a different rating system, has its own specific parameters and lists. Basically, however, they all rate the e-mail sender reputation.
What is an email sender reputation?
Reputation means good reputation, i.e. image. An email sender reputation is an evaluation using a score that an Internet Service Provider (ISP) gives to a company that sends emails. The score represents the ranking of your IP address compared to others - the score is therefore decisive for the deliverability of your e-mail. The higher the score, the more likely the emails are to reach the recipients. If the score falls, the e-mails are sent to the recipient's spam folder or rejected from the outset.
The ISPs proceed in a similar way when assigning scores: If, for example, a company repeatedly sends e-mails to inactive addresses, these are temporarily blocked or put on the blacklist - in this case, the e-mail addresses are permanently blocked.
The following factors influence the score:
- The number of mails sent by the company.
- How many recipients have marked the company's mails as spam.
- How often the service provider has marked the mails as spam.
- Whether the company is on various blacklists.
- How often the mails cannot be delivered, e.g. because they were sent to unknown users.
- How many recipients open the email, reply, forward, delete or click on links in the email.
- How many recipients unsubscribe from the list.
- Whether the SPF and DKIM are correct.
- The correctness of the metadata, format and email structure.
How do I get a good score?
For a good score, you can optimise three areas:
- Technical set-up
- Data quality
- Email content
Technical setup
- Verify your domain. (You can find instructions here)
- Link your email sender address to an active website.
- Do NOT use free web-based email addresses as senders (e.g. @gmail ...).
- Also avoid addresses like noreply@xxx
Data quality
- Maintain your address list (Quentn supports you in this: the addresses to which the e-mails could not be delivered are automatically (temporarily) blocked. This way you avoid sending repeatedly to inactive addresses).
- Only use contacts who have registered via a form and confirmed their e-mail address: Through the double-opt-in procedure, you can be sure that the recipient is also interested in your messages - after all, he or she has signed up for them.
Email content
- Write good subject lines
- Avoid spam words
- Use few pictures and make sure you have the right text-to-picture ratio (70:30). The faster the email can be loaded, the better - that's why images should be less than 1 MB.
- Make your e-mails interesting. This may sound strange to you - but the recipient's behaviour has a significant influence on your score. If he does not open your e-mail or only opens it briefly, this has a negative effect on you. So: Give him incentives to interact with you.
- Avoid typical spam triggers such as repetitions and recurring characters, for example "+++" or "###", blank lines, words with CAPITAL letters, "pack" punctuation marks ("!!!", "???" or "---"), numbers with series of zeros, for example "10,000" or "10 000", identical text passages, for example more than two "Click here now" links, multiple paragraphs one after the other.
- Avoid inserting more than two blank lines between the body and signature of your mail.
User-Whitelisting
Another very effective measure is to offer your recipients user whitelisting.
This means that the recipient adds your Quentn sender email address to their address book or list of desired contacts.