How to Stop Your Emails from Being Reported as Spam
Are your emails being reported as spam and abuse even though the reader subscribed for your list? Here are my top tips for eliminating abuse reports.
I saw a question in a Mailchimp group on Facebook and I want to answer it here because I think it’s a super important question.
They said, “we have a business that only collects emails from an opt in on the website or if they check the box to checkout we get quite a high number of abuse in our email sends. They’re reported as abuse when they send an email. Do you know how to solve this? Our emails are all about the brand and product. There is no mixed messaging. It’s a skincare brand and the emails are all about the branded product.”
Make it clear
First off, I would wonder about that subscription checkbox at the checkout. If it is clearly stating that you’re gonna get a newsletter now.
I mean people expect to get some emails when they purchase something from e-commerce, but if you don’t clearly say, ” now you’re on our mailing list and we’re gonna send you these types of emails check here if you want to receive them.”
They may not really understand that they signed up for your newsletter and they may think that it’s something that they have to do to get the product.
Send a Welcome Email
So the second thing is send a welcome email right away, like immediately. “You subscribe to our newsletter, this is what you’re going to get.” “We’re going to send you a newsletter weekly and we’re gonna tell you how to use our product.” “We’re going to tell you our new products that are coming up.” “We’re going to tell you about our product in the news.” “We’re going to give you new industry news.”
Make sure in that welcome email that you tell them, “We’re going to send you a quarterly newsletter”, “We’re going to send you a weekly newsletter” or “We’re going to send you a monthly newsletter.”
Welcome emails are my favorite way to keep emails from being reported as spam.
Make it easy to unsubscribe
You want to tell them what’s going on and as quickly as possible. And you also want to have a big old subscribe button at the top.
You don’t want to send emails to people who don’t want your emails. So if they subscribed because they thought they had to, to get the product, then they can unsubscribe quickly and they won’t report you as abuse.
Send emails on a regular basis
This is an e-commerce company, so they probably are sending these newsletters on a regular basis.
If you’re sending weekly, make sure you send them weekly. If you’re sending monthly, make sure you send them monthly. You can even send them quarterly, but just make sure you’re sending them on a regular basis.
Keep it professional
Check the from email address and make sure it’s a domain name that you’re sending from like “sam@skincare.com” because that would be people’s expectation. My expectation would be that when I got a newsletter its actually from a domain name.
Make sure that domain name has been verified with your email service. You don’t want to just authenticate it, you want it verified also.
That means you’re going to put a little snippet of code on your domain name server (DNS), so when Mailchimp sends his email out for you, it looks like it’s coming from you directly. Even though it’s coming from Mailchimp it’s not going to look like it’s coming from Mailchimp.
Using a professional email address will keep your emails from being reported as spam.
Going directly to spam filters
The other thing is that it may be going into spam filters.
I have a post on my blog, How to Get Your Emails Through Spam Filters. I suggest that you go check that one out. There are great tips on How to Clean Your Email List.
A lot of this is list management and maintenance that you have to do on a regular basis to keep things out of spam filters because you could have spam traps on your mailing lists that are tagging your mailing list as spam to the inbox reader. Sounds very complicated to the inbox reader and that’s why it’s dropping it into spam.
Now I do have another blog post, How to Keep Spam Email Addresses Off Your Email List, that will help you with knowing what a spam trap is and how to get rid of them.
If you have any questions, please put them in the comments below.
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