One thing every e-marketer should know is that unsolicited commercial emails (UCEs or spam) are, well, unsolicited, and generally unwelcome in readers’ inboxes. You don’t want your messages to annoy your readers by seeming like spam—many will hit “delete” without even seeing what you have to offer, and some may report you. And getting a reputation as spammer could get you blacklisted for future correspondence, leaving you unable to get messages through at all.

But how do you do avoid such problems? First, you must know:

1. How UCEs are identified
2. Why messages get blocked
3. What best practices are

Then, of course, you have to follow the best practices and avoid spam tactics.

Here’s how messages get identified as spam:

• By the recipient—the reader clicks the “junk” button
• Software filtering—anti-spam software weighs characteristics of an incoming message against known spam characteristics and filters the message when it has too much in common with UCEs
• Domain blocking—an email service provider such as Hotmail, AOL, or gmail, or the email administrator at a company’s Web domain blacklists messages from a particular sender because the sender is known (or perceived to be) a spammer
• Sender authentication systems—these systems prevent spam by requesting that unknown senders click a link in an automated authentication message before future messages can be received from that sender’s address

What specifically causes a message to be filtered out depends upon the type of filtering that’s happening.  

If recipients are junking your messages, it may be that they don’t remember signing up for your mailing list (or only did so to get a promotional goody). Or, they may feel that the messages arrive too frequently, or are not really relevant to them. Or, perhaps you assumed permission to send email to them based on a prior customer/client/contributor relationship, but did not actually get consent to add them to your mailing list. Frequency, relevance, and permissions are addressed more thoroughly in other white papers.

Getting too many spam complaints could get your company a bad reputation (1 complaint per 1000 messages is considered an acceptable level).That’s where domain blocking comes in to play. Say ten users out of 150 subscribed from the domain bobsuniversity.edu peg your messages as spam within a few months. The university may then decide to block every message that comes from your address.

We already mentioned that spam-like content can lead to software filtering, but what constitutes spam-like content? Here are are some of the things filters look for:

• Subject lines in ALL CAPS and/or containing word “free,” the names of certain pharmaceuticals, the dollar sign ($), and/or the words quote, samples,  mortgage, membership, or access
• Messages containing some or all of the above in the body
• Messages comprised of one large image or several smaller ones, and little or no text
• Messages that do NOT contain a physical address and phone number for the sender
• Messages that do NOT contain an unsubscribe option, or with nonfunctional unsubscribe links
• Misleading subject lines, headers, or content
• Messages that are commercial in nature, but not identified as such

Legally, commercial emails must make it clear that they are commercial, must contain the sender’s physical address and phone number, must contain a working unsubscribe feature, and must NOT mislead the reader. 

Clearly, all practices that can lead to spam filtering are best avoided.

But how can you tell if filtering is happening to you, and what can you do to stop it? To know what’s going on with your messages, the best thing you can do is pay close attention to the reports generated after you send a message using ez.newsletter. Then, if you detect any of the following potential problems, follow the corresponding advice below: 

1. If a set of subscribers routinely ignore your messages, ask those readers ONCE to confirm their subscriptions. Unsubscribe the ones who don’t respond, or who reply asking to be removed. Any users who opt out using an unsubscribe link created in the program will automatically be unsubscribed.
2. If you get three hard bounces from a given user, remove that user from your list.
3. If you notice that you have no opens from the subscribers at a specific domain (as in, none of the 50 subscribers at pinkpoodles.com opens your messages) or worse, you have nothing but hard bounces from the domain, the domain may be blocking you. Here, you can contact the administrator of the domain and ask—diplomatically—why your messages aren’t getting through. If you can prove to the administrator that people at their domain requested your messages, your address may get removed from the blacklist, so know when those users subscribed and be ready to discuss the signup process you use.
4. You don’t have to worry about sender authentication systems at all. Why? Because the ez.newsletter team receives and automatically responds to them on your behalf.

You can also register your commercial address with abuse.net’s feedback loop. It will also help you to identify potential problems before they become real problems.

Put more simply, best practices for commercial email messages and company newsletters are as follows:

1. Keep a clean list.
2. Only send to those who have specifically stated that it is OK for you to do so.
3. Have a working unsubscribe link in your messages.
4. Comply with all spam legislation.
5. Send at a responsible frequency.
6. Maintain strong HTML coding, and use ONLY HTML, no script languages.

Go to http://www.ftc.gov/spam for updates to the laws regarding UCEs. In The Complete Guide to Email Marketing, Bruce C. Brown recommends these additional spam resources:

www.spamlaws.com
www.cauce.org
www.spamcop.net

Finally, there are a couple more things you can consider to reduce the risk of spam complaints while increasing customer satisfaction:

1. Provide instructions for registering complaints as part of a complete anti-spam policy and link to a page containing those policies in each message.
2. Offer customized frequency and/or content options to your users so that they can choose how often to receive email from you and what they would like to read about.

These final suggestions are not quick fixes: they will require some additional thought and time to put into place. But doing so could be well worthwhile for the increased relevance and understanding they will bring.

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