How To Make Sure That Your Legitimate Marketing Emails Are Not Identified As Spam

If your business relies on email marketing to get your message through to your customers, you might want to pay attention to this. Spam filters lately have increasingly been hurting legitimate businesses by blocking marketing emails. The fact that your customers have confirmed that they want to subscribe to your marketing emails and newsletter does not guarantee that your emails would get through to them. And it is even worse when you don't know that you or your company have been blacklisted.

There are quite a few reasons why you might be blacklisted. The most common one is you are accused of sending unsolicited emails. This could be your subscriber just forgot that some time in the past they subscribed to your newsletters, or this could be people who did this deliberately to hurt your business.

In order to make sure that your emails reach your customers, you have to monitor the emails delivery and check if your emails bounce back. Normally the bounce message will contain the reason why your email is not delivered. Pay attention to these messages as they might indicate that your emails are marked as spam: Access Denied, Message Refused, Client Host Rejected, Sender Address Rejected, Sender Domain Not Found, and similar messages.

When you are accused of spamming, you should remain calm. The first thing you need to do is to prove that you are innocent. And this is where you would thank the confirmed opt-in mechanism. For those of you who don't know what confirmed opt-in is, when a user subscribes to a newsletter, the user will then get an email that basically asks the user to confirm their subscription by clicking at the activation link. Their subscription will become active only when they click on the activation link. How would this benefit you? When the users click at the activation link, you will have a record of the date, time, and IP address of the computer used to confirm. You can then use this as a proof that the users did confirm they wanted to receive emails from you.

Some other basic tips to protect you from being blacklisted:

• Make sure your emails conform to CAN-SPAM act (search Google if you don't know what CAN-SPAM is).


• Never send emails to prospects that haven't confirm their subscriptions.


• Make sure that your unsubscribe link works.


• Get whitelisted with major email providers (Google, AOL, Yahoo).