Recipients who flag your mail as “Spam” or “Junk” have the greatest impact on your reputation as a sender. It is essential you avoid this at all costs by delivering great and relevant campaigns to recipients who want to receive it.
To avoid complaints, you should:
- Never use a purchased, harvested or “scraped” list of any kind
- Ideally, they should have opted in to the list; at the very least, make sure you have a direct relationship with every single address on your list - ie, avoid sending on behalf of a third party
- Make your sign-up process clear, explaining what someone is signing up for, when they will start receiving emails, and how often they can expect to hear from you; you can also include this information in the confirmation email you send.
- Use a consistent sender name and email address
- Use a subject line that truthfully describes the content of your email
- Honor all opt-out requests immediately
- Abide by the rules of CAN SPAM and the spam laws of the country you reside in
- Keep your list up to date
- Don’t reactivate old addresses
- Send emails on a regular basis
If you comply with all of these rules, you’re off to a great start. To make things even better you’ll want your list (and the messages you send to them) to be both segmented/grouped and your content to be well-targeted .