Email marketing helps companies reach their clients and market their services or products. Yet, success in an email marketing campaign is heavily dependent on the deliverability of the emails to the recipients’ inboxes. Marketers have to deal with the hassle of letting their emails get rejected by email spam filters. This blog is geared towards explaining what email spam filters are and what marketers can do to boost their email deliverability.
Understanding Email Spam Filters
Mail spam filters are email software that scans emails to decide if it’s a spam or not. Emails are evaluated by spam filters using a variety of strategies, including:
Spam filters also read the email body, subject line, and headers for terms and phrases that might be deemed spam related.
Reputation: Spam filters assess the reputation of the sender by looking at the IP address, domain, and history of the sender.
User Suggestions: Spam filters might take into account the user suggestion (report spam, or not spam) in order to make the filter more accurate.
How Email Spam Filters Work
Spam filters employ a complicated algorithm to assess emails and identify spam emails. These algorithms are proprietary and vary from one spam filter to the next. Yet some of the typical methods employed by spam filters are:
1. Blacklists
Spam filters work by accessing something called a blacklist. These are lists of spammers or individual IP addresses that have been detected for sending junk mail. If such an email is received from a blacklisted account, the filter can filter it out well before it gets into your inbox, providing pretty good protection against most unwanted messages.
2. Content Filtering
A second foundation of spam filtering is content filtering, which looks through the contents of an email and attempts to identify spam characteristics. This might include searching keywords, phrases, or even formatting styles spammers are known for: too much capitalization, or too many exclamation points. A set of conditions would automatically mark the email as spam and place it in a junk folder.
3. Bayesian Filtering
Spam filters utilize Bayesian filtering, which is actually a statistical method originating in machine learning. It takes into account e-mail contents and compares them to known spam and actual e-mails. The filter would find patterns and attributes inherent to spam so that each time a new email arrives it could work out its likelihood of being spam based on its content. This is much more efficient once time has passed as the filter begins to learn from all of the input data.
4. Reputation Filtering
Reputation filtering is another modern approach in spam blocking. The filters consider the sender reputation based on a variety of factors including IP address, domain history, and email habits. And if a sender’s emails are notorious for making people complain or encounter issues, then his or her reputation will most likely be considered a bad one and more of his or her emails are likely to become spam.
5. User Feedback
User reviews are, indeed, one of the key elements in Spam Filter development. Big Email Providers improve their filtering based on the massive user input. Every time someone filters spam messages, or shows that an e-mail considered spam really is a legitimate message, that data is analysed in search of enhancements. Through learning from user experiences, Spam Filters can keep up with emerging spam trends and reduce false positives and false negatives.
Improving Email Deliverability
Marketers must comply with these recommendations in order to increase the deliverability of email and avoid receiving a spam response:
1. Be A Legitimate Email Service Provider:
If you choose a legitimate email provider, your emails will be delivered to the inbox and not spam.
2: Authenticate Your Emails:
Email authentication is an approach to verify the sender’s identity and ensure that emails aren’t spoofed or forwarded. Verifying your emails provides credibility for ESPs and recipients, and helps eliminate the possibility of your emails being blocked as spam. Email authentication technologies include SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance).
SPF: SPF is a DNS (Domain Name System) record which lists the IP addresses or domains that can send emails on behalf of your domain. By creating an SPF record, you deter spammers from emailing on your domain and make your email deliverable.
DKIM: DKIM is a cryptographic authentication protocol that adds a digital signature to your email header. This signature is used to ensure that the email has not been altered during sending and came from your domain.
DMARC: DMARC is an alignment standard that combines SPF and DKIM to create a common authentication framework. DMARC also lets you configure how ESPs should treat email that doesn’t pass authentication, such as quarantining or rejecting it.
3. Keep it Free of Spam:
Don’t put spammy keywords, phrases or formatting in your emails, and make sure your subject lines are relevant and accurate.
4. Ensure You’ve Got A Clean Email List:
With a clean email list, you can send emails to active subscribers who are interested in what you have to offer and are less likely to dismiss your emails as spam. A clean list also helps to lower bounce rates that affect your reputation and deliverability.
Periodic List Cleansing: Clean your email list on a regular basis, including unsubscribes, hard bounces, and role emails (e.g., [email protected]). This proactive practice boosts the quality and open rates of your list and therefore delivers emails more efficiently.
Double Opt-in: Use a double opt-in mechanism so subscribers have the motivation to sign up for your emails. Double opt-in eliminates the risk of spam traps and boosts list participation, which enhances your sender profile.
Personalisation and Segmentation: Personalize and segment your email newsletters based on your subscriber interests, behavior and demographics. Personal, timely emails drive higher open rates, reduce spam complaints and in the long run increase email deliverability.
5. Check Your Email Reputation: You can watch your email reputation by periodically monitoring your IP and domain reputation and if necessary, taking steps to enhance it.
Conclusion: Deliverability 101: How do Email Spam Filters Work?
Email spam filters are instrumental in keeping email communications safe and secure, as well as keeping your email account free of spam. If you want your emails to go to the inbox and not end up in spam then marketers must try to make their emails deliverable and maintain an email reputation. Marketers can boost the effectiveness of their email marketing campaigns and engage their customers by being proactive in following best practices and being informed of all the recent email deliverability issues.
