6 Tips For Getting Past The Spam Filters
By Anna Johnson on July 3rd, 2008Here are six (6) tips for helping your email messages fly through the spam filters.
1. Regularly check your blacklist status. Visit these sites for blacklist updates: http://www.dnstuff.com; http://www.barracudacentral.com/ and http://www.Senderbase.org.
2. Use a dedicated IP address for sending email, perhaps different IPs for transactional and promotional types of email.
3. Get whitelisted. Request whitelist status from your ISP, get accredited by email reputation service companies such as Habeas (http://www.habeas.com) and Goodmail (http://www.goodmailsystems.com), and ask subscribers to whitelist your email address.
4. Test confirmed optin versus single optin.
A single optin approach can lead to a much bigger list – and greater sales – but can also lead to fake submissions, people erroneously or maliciously subscribing others and, consequently, more complaints.
Confirmed optin – where subscribers must respond to an email (by clicking a link) to confirm their subscription avoids these problems to a greater degree… but can lead to a smaller list. I suspect that confirmed optin may be the safer way to go if you share an IP range (e.g. if you use an email service provider) and/or “force” people to opt-in to view your content (e.g. if you use a name squeeze page). Single optin may be better if you use a dedicated IP address for sending email and you make opting-in completely optional and available after visitors have had a chance to see what you offer. However, as always, ya gotta test!
5. Manage your list. Provide an easy way for people to unsubscribe and make sure the email management software or service you use to facilitate “unsubscribing” works! Further, clean your list daily – get rid of spam rejections and bounces.
6. Avoid spammy content. Use an application such as SpamArrest to detect content that may trigger the filters.
Source: Mitch Eisen, “Use These Tips To Get Past Spam Filters,” SIPAlert Newsletter, June 23, 2008
