Many times companies send bulk email online with high hopes, only to find that their conversion rates have been sabotaged by an inordinately high rate of delivery failures. This occurs when many of the emails you’ve sent get directed to the spam filter of the recipient, and are never read. A few tips for improving your delivery rates and avoiding the dreaded spam treatment are listed below.
Use opt-in email blasting lists
Avoid blindly emailing prospects without some positive indication of interest on their part. This can include people who have purchased goods from you in the past, or have visited your website and asked to receive further information, or consumers who opted-in to receiving information about products or services of the type you provide from a third party.
Avoid classification as a “spammer”
Failure to comply with the CAN SPAM act of 2003 by offering bulk email recipients a way to unsubscribe from getting your emails can result in your being classified as a spammer, causing email delivery services to, in some cases, refuse to send out email on your behalf.
Use a “live” email address to send mail
Many spam detection software programs can tell if you are sending email from a dead address, one which is not provisioned to receive return emails. To avoid this classification, send your emails from an address that can be replied to.
Check the DNS status of your mail server
To detect spam, a number of anti-spam programs will do a reverse DNS search on the IP address from which an email has been received. If the IP address does not match the domain name of the mail server, they will classify the email as spam and refuse to accept it or divert it to the recipient’s spam folder. Check the DNS status of your mail server and make sure the IP address corresponds with the domain name.
Send email from a static IP address
Some anti-spam programs will test for and reject as spam emails sent from a dynamic IP address. This is an IP address which changes from time to time, which is often the case with home IP addresses provided to consumers by ISPs. Businesses are more likely to have static IP addresses. In either case, it can be worthwhile to find out what type of address you are sending emails from and look into changing to a static IP address if possible in order to conduct mass email campaigns.