Successful email campaigns require good content and an understanding of technology
Why some email campaigns are marked as SPAM and how to avoid this.
You regularly send out newsletters? That is good. You already use an email automation tool such as ActiveCampaign or Sendinblue for your newsletter? That’s even better. But do you also make sure that your emails are not recognized as spam?
In my experience, the subject of spam avoidance is given far too little attention. Most people optimize the headline, they refine the email texts, they spend hours looking for suitable images that perfectly match the content, they validate the email addresses and they use sophisticated automation tools with which they can send thousands of emails per day. But none of that helps. If you look at the statistics of the newsletter, the nasty surprise comes: out of a thousand messages sent, maybe only 50 were opened, maybe 1–2% were clicked. In the end you are disappointed and feverishly think about what you could do better. Or you think that it just can’t get any better. But it does. For example, Mailchimp did an analysis in 2019 and determined an average open rate of over 21% and a click rate of up to 5%. The list can be found under the link https://mailchimp.com/resources/email-marketing-benchmarks/.
The emails do not even reach your recipient’s mailbox
I do not mean to suggest that the activities mentioned so far are not important. They are all part of a successful email campaign, but if your open rates are significantly lower, it could be because your emails did not even reach your recipient’s mailbox or end up in the spam folder. In this article I will explain why your emails may be recognized as spam, which techniques are used here and what you can do about it. To explain my statements, I will use screenshots from the website https://mail-tester.com several times, as you can very well test the quality of your own email campaigns on a scale from 1 (spam) to 10 (your email will most likely be delivered).
SPAM was a huge problem
Just a few years ago, you were flooded by spam. The emails were often a kind of badly written and intrusive advertisement that you knew immediately that it was spam. But this type of spam could be quickly identified and filtered. It was enough to search for certain search terms such as Viagra and you could quickly identify and filter them from advertising. For example, if you send an email with the content “buy viagra online” to mail-tester.com, you shouldn’t be surprised by the result. The mail is immediately recognized as SPAM and should no longer be delivered by any mail provider.
Modern spam required new methods
Over time, however, the spam messages also got better and so new techniques had to be established in order to continue to be able to keep spam out of the mailboxes. The magic words to avoid spam are:
- SPF
- DKIM
- DMARC
- Blacklists
SPF: Sender policy framework
With SPF, a company or a domain owner can publish their permitted mail servers. This happens via a DNS entry on your own domain. Suppose I owned example.com. Then I could specify that only a mail server with the IP address 81.28.223.11 can send emails for example.com. If the emails are sent from a different IP address, your email scoring will be severely punished.
DKIM: DomainKeys Identified Mail
With the help of DKIM, the receiving e-mail server can ensure that the received e-mail has not been changed. This is done via asymmetric encryption using a private and public key. Here, too, the corresponding values must be stored in the DNS entries of the domain, with which the receiving mail server can check the incoming mail. Even a DKIM error almost automatically leads to a classification as SPAM.
DMARC: Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance
DMARC is a mechanism that builds on DKIM and SPF. The DMARC setting determines how the recipient of e-mails carries out authentication. At the same time, it is determined how the e-mail is to be handled in the event of an authentication error by the recipient. DMARC
Blacklists
In addition to the previous functions for validating individual e-mails, there are still a large number of e-mail blacklists in which domains are entered that have attracted negative attention in the past. This can be because, for example, you have received negative attention in the past by sending SPAM messages or because there may have been a sudden increase in the volume of e-mails. As soon as you are on such a blacklist, there is almost no getting through to the big email providers like gmail or outlook.com.
Make the correct DNS settings and then test them
Don’t let the technical terminology put you off. SPF and DKIM are not rocket science and only require an entry in the DNS settings of your domain. Most email automation service providers such as ActiveCampaign or Sendinblue make configuration easy and deliver the necessary entries directly.
As soon as you have made the necessary settings, you should definitely check the planned e-mail campaign with the help of mail-tester.com. It only makes sense to send emails if you have a value of 9 or 10. With all lower values, the probability of ending up in the SPAM folder is far too high and all the effort for the e-mail campaign was in vain.
I hope this article will help you increase your open rate and make your email campaigns more successful. If interested, I could write about how to automate these checks in my next article.
