Email Deliverability: Avoid Spam Traps & Spam Complaints – Lyris

The biggest red flags that can convince ISPs about an email marketer’s legitimacy or lack of it are spam complaints and spam traps. Protect your sender reputation by educating yourself on how to by-pass email deliverability problem areas like spam traps and spam complaints.

Flashing Red Arrows- The Dreaded Spam Trap

Sending emails to a spam trap is like putting out a sign with flashing arrows that says, “I’m spam! Block me now!”

What is a spam trap? It is an email addresses that ISPs and receivers use specifically to shine the light on spammers. Call them out of the dark corner hiding places.

Spam Traps come in two different varieties

• Accounts that are not linked to or accessed by humans. Since no actual person uses the account, it follows that they could not go through opt in process for an email delivery program.
  
  
• Accounts that have been left along the wayside, abandoned, and no longer used. ISPs will use these accounts and will block you if emails are being sent to them. Their justification is if they aren’t active anymore then they should not still be receiving email.
  

Repercussions of being sent to a spam trap are quick and severe. Most of the time, ending with ISPs totally blocking the sender’s IP address, thus making email deliverability nearly impossible, until you remove these spam traps from your email list.

Dodging and Getting Un-trapped

Which addresses that the ISPs are using as spam traps is not public knowledge, making it nearly unfeasible to recognize and eliminate these specific spam traps from the email list of marketers.

While the former is unfeasible, it is feasible to recognize if the email lists you are using have more spam traps than Swiss cheese has holes, since most ISPs strictly do not tolerate emails from email marketers to these outlawed addresses. These are easily recognizable when your email deliverability seems to jump off a steep cliff and then through the appearance of your IP address on several blacklists.

The first step to avoiding a buildup of spam traps is to sustain a correct subscriber record:

• Put into practice a double confirmation opt-in process. Something as minute as a typo, for example hitting the letter v instead of c, can send a perfectly good email into a snarling spam trap. Usually the sender is asked to click on a verification link from their address prior to the addition to your email list; this will keep you from activating a spam trap unwittingly.
  
  
• Center your attention on cultivating your house list naturally instead of purchasing an email list from brokers. This is by no means an implication that all email list brokers partake in dubious business practices. With that being said, purchasing a rotten list with data that is not the cream of the crop is the best way inadvertent damage is done to email marketers sending reputations.
  (Read the article: Four Guaranteed Ways to Trash Your Reputation.)
  

If and when you discover that you have landed in a bit of a spam trap mess, you will need to revisit your house list to focus on those that have not responded to promotions or email messages from you for a long time. This can be done through a re-opt-in process. Dividing your database on the basis of up to date action, helps to get you back in the rhythm of your customers’ inclinations and contact expectations.

Spam Complaints- Little Pebbles that can Build a Wall; Blocking Your Email Deliverability

ISPs see spam complaints less seriously than spam traps; still they can hurt your sender reputation. Spam complaints happen when the recipients of your emails click the “Reports as Spam” link, sending off a signal to their ISP that your email was not wanted or asked for.

Not being completely rigid, ISPs can understand that a few spam complaints are going to happen. More times than not, clicking of the dreaded spam button tends to be more from handiness than actual spam recording. Free email systems, such as hotmail and yahoo have made it easier for their clients allowing them to look over their inbox and mark those that they aren’t interested in reading and reporting them as spam. This is much more convenient for their clients, instead of having to open every email and hitting the unsubscribe button. Therefore the ISPs only punish email marketers who have collected to numerous spam complaints.

But just how many spam complaints does it take to get you blocked?

Each ISP has their own number, however generally speaking it is usually 1 spam complaint for every 1000 emails sent and delivered. How it works is, each ISP keeps a total of all the emails you put into their networks and takes that total and compares it with the number of spam complaints received in response.

When you have reached above and beyond a ISPs quota, they will sometimes reciprocate with a temporary punishment that may prevent your email delivery. Keeping you from your inbox, for a time frame of at least 72 hours, and if the spam complaints just keep coming, it can end up blocking you IP address and therefore your email deliverability permanently.

How to Keep Track of and Diminish Spam Complaints

The only way to be keep track is if a potential customer has reported your emails as spam is to participate in a ISPs feedback loop. These feedback loops are a way of communicating between the ISP and email marketers such as yourself, allowing them to tell you which potential customers are no longer potential customers and those who reported you as spam. Again this is not public knowledge, and the only way to be included in these loops is to contact each ISP individually.

Luckily, there are superior email-service providers, Lyris being one of them, who will take care of this for you. Email deliverability teams will submit an application for feedback loops, during the account –setup course of action. That way, when an email is reported as spam, the email-marketing software will automatically eliminate that address from your email list.

Monitoring your spam complaint rate meticulously to make certain that the rate stays down and knowing what caused the jump if it makes a spiral climb, is very important.

Lyris HQ Email Marketing makes it easy to see how many spam complaints each message generates.

If spam complaints are bounding upward you might question:

• Have you bought an email list, drug up an old email list or changed the opt-in process? That could be a signal that people who are receiving your email deliveries do not remember opting in.
  
  
• Are there any changes that have occurred lately to your email marketing program? Things like how much you send, how frequently, or even what kind of subject matter you send. If so then this could be a red flag that those who receive your email deliveries are not interested any longer in your subject matter or you are not hitting their standards.
  

Don’t Get Derailed by Spam Traps and Spam Complaints