Email best practices to avoid being marked as spam

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Courtney Smith
Courtney Smith Posts: 26 6senser
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If you're like me, you probably have a copy of Latane's book, No Forms. No Spam. No Cold Calls, sitting on your desk (or somewhere easily referenceable). For the purposes of this post, I highly suggest dusting it off.

6sense has long proclaimed that traditional marketing tactics - forms, spam, and cold calls - create a bad prospect experience. In chapter one of the book, Latane outlines a bold, if not simple, approach to email: if you know nothing, do nothing. If you send emails to people that you know a lot about and who are in-market and ready to buy and you deliver content you know people are interested in right at the time when it's useful to them, it's not spam. It's just a good customer experience.

Even in light of Google's impending policy changes aimed at reducing spam, Conversational Email is well poised to help you deliver great customer experiences. A combination of 6sense's best-in-class data and custom-trained generative AI will help you send fewer, more impactful emails to the right people! But to avoid your email being marked as spam, you must align your email practices with Google's new regulations.

Below, we've shared some recommendations to help you maximize the effectiveness of your email strategy (despite the forthcoming changes):

  1. Gradually Warm Up New Inboxes: When you introduce a new inbox, it's essential to nurture it by slowly increasing the email volume over time. This process, known as warming up, helps to establish a good reputation with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and prevents your email from being marked as spam. Start by sending emails to high-intent leads or recipients who are more likely to engage with your content. Their positive responses and interactions with your emails - such as opening, replying, and moving your emails to specific folders - signals to ISPs that your emails are reputable and wanted, boosting your sender reputation.
  2. Keep Your Email Volume Consistent: After the initial warm-up phase, keep your email volume consistent. Abrupt changes or spikes in the number of emails you send can be interpreted as spam by email filters, causing problems with deliverability.
  3. Prioritize Engaged and Verified Users: It's not just about the number of emails you're sending - it's about who's receiving them. If recipients mark your emails as spam or your emails bounce, it can negatively influence your email reputation and deliverability, even if you're only sending 100 emails per day.
  4. Avoid Unverified Emails from Purchased Data: Using unverified emails from purchased data can significantly increase deliverability risks.
  5. Leverage List Clean Tools: These tools help minimize the risks of invalid addresses and spam traps.
  6. Use Marketing and Intent Data for Targeting: By targeting individuals who are more likely to interact with your emails positively, you can enhance user engagement. Consider focusing on inbound or 6QA prospects, for example.
  7. Avoid Images or Links: To reduce the risk of triggering spam filters, avoid including images or links in your emails. This strategy can enhance deliverability by minimizing potential red flags for spam detection systems.
  8. Send Personalized and Relevant Content: Boost user engagement by ensuring that your content is both personalized and relevant to the recipient's needs and interests.
  9. Maintain Low Bounce and Complaint Rates: Strive for a bounce rate below 5% and a complaint rate of under 0.1% (Monitor complaint rates through Google Postmasters Tools.)
  10. Remove Inactive Recipients: To maintain a high engagement rate and protect your email reputation, remove recipients who haven't interacted with your emails in over six months.
  11. Update Contact Restrictions Promptly: If a recipient opts out, verbally, or otherwise, or if their email address bounces, update your system of record so other systems don't email them again.

Have additional thoughts on email best practices? Share them in the comments below!

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