We all know that the "spam button" is kryptonite to an email marketing program. As ISPs rely more on user behavior to assess sender reputation, it becomes even more crucial to ensure that your readers don’t report your messages as spam. Rebuilding your reputation and escaping from the downward spiral of being labeled a spammer by an ISP is a difficult and slow process. Moreover, messages that are never delivered due to spam complaints are lost revenue, which no one can afford these days.

Further to Ghia Espino's blog post earlier this week about how to overcome never-ending spam blocks, here are five steps you can take to decrease and possibly eliminate spam complaints:

1. Check your content and subject lines – Although ISPs are not as concerned with what you are selling versus how you are selling it, it’s still important to make sure that your subject line and content are consistent with each other. Your recipients should not be receiving any unexpected surprises.

2. Placement of the unsubscribe link – Consider moving the unsubscribe link to the top of your message. Many recipients who don’t wish to receive emails will hit the spam button before searching for a link discreetly placed in the message or replying back to the sender, simply because it is easier, quicker and always available. While reporting spam will successfully remove them from your list, it will also raise red flags to the ISP.

3. Monitor your spam reports – Some of the larger ISPs, such as Yahoo!, Hotmail and AOL allow feedback loops to be enabled. Consistent review of these reports will provide insight into whether or not your emails are being successfully delivered. If you see that your spam complaints are high with a particular ISP, you may want to consider scaling back on sending to those recipients, or sending only to those recipients who have recently interacted with your emails. Also, feedback loop reports provided by the major ISPs are a good diagnostic tool to estimate the success rate of your messages at ISPs that don’t allow feedback loops.

4. Keep your subscribers new – Re-evaluate the “age” of your subscriber list. If your older subscribers have been inactive for 12+ months, you may want to remove them from your list. This is because:

• Recipients who have forgotten that they subscribed to your program may hit the spam button thinking that it was sent without permission; and
• Old email addresses could indicate abandonment resulting in a spam trap.

5. Think back to basics – Only send relevant emails to subscribers who have opted-in to your email marketing program. Since spam is associated with random, unwanted emails, make sure that your lists are segmented so that emails are targeted appropriately and provide a benefit to your readers whether it be an informational newsletter or notification of an upcoming sale.

Don’t allow your messages to be labeled as spam. It can be prevented! For additional tips on how to protect your email reputation, I recommend the email marketing article "Four Guaranteed Ways to Trash Your Reputation", here on http://www.lyrishq.com/.

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About the Author

Shanel Choi is an account manager at Lyris, working with clients to improve their online marketing initiatives and programs. She provides clients with strategic and best practices knowledge to help them meet their e-marketing goals.

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