Restore your reputation and Inbox Placement
A guide to getting and staying out of the spam folder
Introduction
Seeing your emails being sent to the spam folder is something every company dreads. There can be several causes for this behavior. You might be sending mail to too many inactive users, maybe your email content isn’t relevant or wanted by users and they mark your emails as spam, you might be hitting spamtraps, ...
This document describes a couple of measures you can take, in order to clean up your lists and campaigns and get your emails back into the inbox. It is important to keep in mind that these actions will not instantly guarantee Inbox placement, as restoring your domain or IP reputation might take quite some time. Nevertheless, it is the only way to reestablish inbox placement.
Checklist
Clean up your list
Sunsetting
Apply “sunsetting” to your lists. This means you will optout users who haven’t shown any interaction (views/clicks) with your campaigns for a certain amount of time. A threshold of 3 to 6 months is a good time frame to start with.
Having inactive users in your lists might seem harmless, but they can cause some serious reputation damage on the way:
- When providers notice that a large portion of users you send mails to aren’t interacting with your e-mails, it might look like your emails are unwanted. As a result, providers might lower your reputation and your mails will end up in the spam folder.
- Inactive users might also be deleting your emails without opening them. There is no way to detect this. It is however, a clear sign to the provider that the emails are unwanted.
Opt outing inactive users will increase the portion of active users, which gives a positive sign to providers and helps restore your reputation. Additionally, your campaign results will be better as well because you’ll no longer have inactive users pulling down the results. Sunsetting is also the only process that can eliminate spamtraps that have already gotten into your list. There are 3 types of spamtraps:
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- Recycled spamtraps: Users who have become inactive can be turned into spamtraps by providers, which they use to identify senders who don’t properly maintain list hygiene. Initially, when a user becomes inactive you’ll receive bounces for this address which state the user is no longer active. This user should then be optout after a couple of hits.
- Typo spamtraps: These get into your list if a typo was made in the address during the registration process.
Spamtraps look like any other address, but they typically don’t show any signs of activity. The only way to avoid spamtraps from getting into your list is by applying a double optin system. If the spamtraps are already in your list, sunsetting is the only way to get rid of them.
Reactivation Campaign
Another way to eliminate inactive users is by creating a reactivation campaign. Instead of just opt outing users without any notification, you can choose to send them an email asking them if they are still interested in receiving your mails. Typically, this email should contain a message for the client, stating they’ve been inactive for a certain amount of time. Ask them if they are still interested in receiving your emails and add a link/button in the email for the client to say “yes”. This will not only enable you to optout users who don’t click the confirm button, but it will also generate a click, which is a positive sign to the providers that your emails are actually wanted. Which again will result in your reputation going up.
Engage your users
Segmentation
When creating campaigns, it’s important to focus on which clients you want to reach and what these clients want to receive from you. For instance: it might not be such a good idea to send emails about skirts and dresses to your male audience. Sending irrelevant content to users might entice them to hit the spam button or delete your email without opening, which results in negative reputation impact.
Interactivity
When facing spambox placement, it’s a good idea to generate as much interaction as possible. This can be done by creating a campaign with a strong call to action. For instance: You could send your users an email offering them a discount. To claim this discount, they then have to click a link in the email to activate the offer. Again, clicks generate a positive effect on your reputation.
There are various kinds of interactions which have a positive effect on your reputation:
- Clicks
- Views
- Replies
- Users who add your domain(s) to their safe list
- Users who move your email from the spam folder to the inbox....
Protect your brand
Subdomains
It is a good idea to give different types of email streams a different subdomain. For instance, you could use newsletter.client.com for your bulk mailings, and service.client.com for transactional emails.
Transactional and bulk mailings typically have different reputations tied to them. In general, transactional email streams have a better reputation because these types of emails are opened more frequently than bulk mailings. Additionally, bulk mailings have a higher risk of getting a negative reputation. While both email streams are of course very important, transactional emails are usually more important and you don’t want them going into the spam folder. Giving both streams different subdomains reduces the risk of this happening.
Don't use TLD
Do not use your TLD (top-level domain) in your marketing emails, as it is not supported by Marigold.
Using a subdomain (for instance mail.client.com) instead of your TLD (client.com) for marketing emails keeps the reputation for different email streams separate. This way, the chances of the subdomain and the main domain reputation influencing each other stay limited.
DMARC
Set up DMARC to protect your domain(s) against abuse
DMARC is an anti-phishing technology that can protect your domain(s) from being abused by spammers. Phishing is an attempt to acquire sensitive data from users through different communication channels. E-mail is one of the most popular channels for this kind of abuse. Not only are these phishing attempts dangerous for end users, they can also hurt your brand’s reputation in a very negative way.
DMARC ensures no fraudulent, spoofing or phishing mails sent with your brand’s domain, reaches your client’s inbox or even their spam folder. Fraudulent mails are simply blocked by the provider.
To implement DMARC both SPF and DKIM, have to be in place. This should already be the case as Marigold requires these DNS records by default. Additionally, you’ll have to create the DMARC DNS record. If you currently don’t have DMARC active on your domain(s), please contact us through the Marigold Support Portal. We’ll assist you in setting this up.
Match mail domains and web links
The domain used in the FROM address of your email should be the same as the address used in links and image addresses in the content of your email. When the domains are different there’s a chance for providers to see the emails as phishing attempts, especially if one of the domains has a bad reputation or if they can’t verify that the domains actually all belong to the same company.
Avoid URL shortener
URL shorteners make it impossible for providers to “form an opinion” about the domains used in your emails. Therefore they will be more suspicious of shortened URLs
URL shorteners (such as Bitly, ...) pose a big challenge for providers. As they cannot see the actual domain behind a shortened URL by simply scanning the email, it’s very difficult for them to know whether or not the links in an email point to a malicious source. Therefore,
they will be more cautious when looking at emails which contain these types of links. If the overall reputation of the email is already slightly questionable, this might just be the last drop that was needed for your emails to go into the spam folder. Avoid showing complete URLs in plain text in your email (http://www.client.com/web/portal/page.aspx........)
Avoid showing complete URL as text
Avoid showing complete URLs as text in email content. Links should always be covered by easily readable text under which the URL is hidden for the user. For instance, use “click here to read the full article” instead of showing a messy URL like “http://www.web.client.com/article/page/10/......” in the content of your email.
Keep your list clean - Protect your subscription process
Double optin
A double optin system basically means that you will send an email to new users who just registered. This email will contain a link that the user has to click on in order to activate their account. This way, you can be quite sure you have the correct email address for this user and that this user actually is who he claims to be and really wants your email. Additionally, this generates a highly wanted click! Double optin is the best protection against spamtraps from entering your list and to avoid having bad addresses in your list in general.
Captcha
Adding a Captcha to your registration form protects the process from being abused by bots. These can cause some serious issues for your brand(s) as they are able to insert a large amount of malicious addresses into your list, possibly even without you noticing before it is too late.
Unsubscribe link
Every email should contain an unsubscribe link. The only exception to this are purely transactional emails (such as bills, order confirmations, password resets, ...). Keep in mind that these transactional emails should not contain any marketing content whatsoever.
The unsubscribe link should be easily to find. Don’t try to hide the link by using an abnormally small font size or by giving it a similar color as the background. Once a user has decided he no longer wants your emails, he’ll find a way to get rid of it, either by clicking the unsubscribe link (which doesn’t have a negative impact on your reputation) or by hitting the spam button (which has a very negative impact on your reputation). Therefor it’s better to make unsubscribing easy for the user. If possible, it would even be a good idea to add the unsubscribe link at the top of your email, rather than in the footer.
It’s important that the unsubscribe process is quick and easy. It should be a “one-click” process. Do not ask the user to log in or force him to explain why he’s unsubscribing. It is OK to offer some kind of survey or show a control center where the user can adjust his preferences, but there should always be the option to confirm the unsubscribe request without any questions being asked. Once the request has been confirmed, optout the user immediately without sending any additional emails to confirm this.
An unsubscribe link should stay active for at least 60 days after the emails has been sent. Verify the unsubscribe process on a regular basis as it tends to break without anyone noticing if certain changes are made elsewhere. Since an optout process usually is a one-time setup, people don’t always notice that it stopped working.
Aside from the unsubscribe link in the content it’s also important to add the unsubscribe header into the header of your emails. Fortunately, you can simply enable this feature in the properties of your email in the Tools.
Double email verification field
On your subscription form, add a second field for the user’s email address so he is forced to enter it twice. The 2 addresses then have to match in order for the registration to be successful. This adds a little extra protection against users making typos in their email address during signup.
Other signup form protection techniques
There are several protection methods available nowadays to prevent abuse of signup forms:
- IP restriction mechanisms
- Javascript hidden fields
- ...
If you need additional information on these techniques or if you need help implementing them, please contact your Marigold contact or log a ticket on our Support portal.
