Is it possible to prevent mailings from being recognised as spam?

While it is almost impossible to determine how your mailings are treated by your recipients' mailing processors, there are steps that you can take to help. This guide explains what spam emails are and how you can try to avoid your newsletters from arriving in your recipients' spam or junk inbox folders. 

Overview

Mail processing companies can tell that they are not sent by a person using software like Outlook, Apple Mail, or by big web-based mail providers like Gmail. 

These mail processors can tell that numerous identical messages to multiple people are received at the same time, which is deemed as 'robot' behaviour. Since your message will be unmistakably from a mailing system, it is important to carefully consider the subject of your message and its content.

Firstly, what is spam email?

Essentially, spam emails are those that email processing systems have predicted to be unwanted.

This can be the result of a number of things, from its content to the sender's "reputation". Often, email processors automatically prevent unrequested, irrelevant, and potentially fraudulent emails from arriving in a user's main inbox.

Tips

1. Consistency is key when sending newsletter campaigns. This includes consistency of both design/content and frequency. Whether your newsletters include only images, only text, or a combination of both, keep your emails consistent to avoid confusion for recipients and for the AI that will assess your emails.
2. Tailor the frequency of your emails to your objective. Bombarding your audience with emails can result in your emails being read as spam.
3. Send valuable content.
4. Build your own mailing list.
5. Clean your bounce list (remove invalid emails and bounces). This will help to boost your sender reputation.
6. Try to avoid sending to info@, support@, enquiries@ and general email addresses.
7. Your recipients who have overly-subscribed to emails/newsletters (especially when recipients have a lot of subscriptions from the same domain) might find that eventually, their email client will mark the latest email from that domain as spam. Whilst this is unlikely, this is not impossible with our own system if a recipient is subscribed to a variety of Artlogic Mailings clients.
8. Don't use bitly links. The links are too short and this is triggered as potential spam - the AI and machine learning will recognise this as a problem.
9. Don't include content that may be assessed as inappropriate for your audience.
10. It is possible that some organisations - especially very large corporations - have filters in place to prevent newsletters reaching their employees' inboxes. It might be advisable for those from large organisations to sign up to your mailing list with their personal email addresses.
11. We strongly discourage purchasing mailing lists as these often contain email addresses that can lead to blacklisting.
12. Since your mailing will be unmistakably from a mailing system, think carefully about the subject of your message in particular and the content to a lesser extent. Make sure that it does not sound like spam. Avoid words like "free," "act now," "limited time," or "save 50%".
13. Make sure that you send from an address that is linked to a working mailbox and preferably sounds like a human name if you are able to. 
14. Try to not get marked as spam too often (obviously, this is difficult to control this as the sender).

More info

1. How to boost your sender reputation
2. Bounce management