Email has become a great method of keeping in touch with donors and constituents. Email is fast, cheap and easy, or is it? If you have done everything that you are supposed to do, to get your subscribers to “opt in” and have found that your emails are not necessarily making it to their destination, you are not alone. Every time an angry recipient hits the “Report Spam” button your reputation is tarnished. You work very hard to get email addresses from qualified “opted in” recipients only to have them “unsubscribe” when you send them the “special offers” that they told you they would like to receive. Your email list is continually dropping out members. Join the club.
There are two big problems that you need to be aware of: 1) recipients are inundated with too much email; 2) spam filters are getting ever more sophisticated.
Everyone is receiving so much correspondence by email that they feel overwhelmed and use the “Report Spam” button as the easiest way to get rid of a lot of “advertisements”. They believe that their name has been sold and that they are receiving emails that they did not really want. If you are selling your lists you may want to reconsider whether this practice is helping or hurting your efforts.
Another issue that you can’t really do anything about is Bayesian spam filtering, named after Rev. Thomas Bayes that is a form of e-mail filtering that processes email using a classifier to identify spam email. It is one of the techniques used by search engines to distinguish illegitimate, spam email from legitimate email. Much modern mail client software has implemented Bayesian spam filtering. Users can also install separate server-side email filters. The way they work is by identifying particular words that have a high probability of occurring in spam email and in legitimate email. If your email has the words that have been identified as spam words in it, your emails may be filtered. They may never make it to their intended destination.
Are you experiencing problems getting legitimate email to your members? Let us know what tactics you are employing to cope with this issue.
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2 comments:
One of the most important ways to address the spam filtering by recipients is to use a reliable email delivery service that uses state of the industry practices to optimize email delivery to those on your opt-in (or better yet, double-opt in) mailing list. There are numerous companies out there that specialize in electronic mailing list services.
http://www.idealware.org/ has an article that goes over some possibilities.
One other point: a good email service provider will provide "bounce management" so you can see who on your list is not receiving your email because it's bouncing back undeliverable. Although at first blush this may not appear to be a spam problem, the truth is that sometimes this is happening because the recipient's server is using a spam blocking service like Spamhaus to identify likely spam and block it from ever being delivered to the recipient even if he/she did opt in to receive it. So check on your bounces from time to time, do a little digging. With some investigating you might find ways to "whitelist" your mail server on the recipient's server.
Any emailer worth her salt knows that today's email management programs pre-screen emails for "spamability" because it's their servers who suffer from blacklisting.
If you are not using an email management system, you should be. Even the smallest lists are better handled by companies like ConstantContact.com and cost little to nothing to get started.
Most importantly, they think about spam every day, all day, and how to avoid that label. They are more up to date than you will ever hope to be at understanding spam filters and the latest changes in technology.
If your email is CANN-SPAM compliant, you should be fine - unless you're using unacceptable language. And these programs automatically analyze your emails, before they are sent, for all compliance issues.
Average spam clicks should be no more than 1 or 2 per 1,000 emails delivered. More than that, and your practices are suspect.
Don't waste your time trying to figure out how to get through the filters - let the pros do it for you. You can then concentrate on the message itself. Which, if done correctly, will have a very high deliverability factor.
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