Unleashing Your Insight From Spam Filters

In the last trailing 12 months, we have sent 793,000 messages, and 8 of those have been flagged as spam. (One-half of those were accidental, but it doesn’t matter—your sender won’t distinguish between the real spam complaints and the others.)

So that’s 8 out of 793,000 messages. Now, your email service provider will never tell you this outright, not wanting you to tiptoe to the line without crossing it, but the truth is that 1 spam complaint per 1,000 sends is something they can live with. Some will even allow 1-3 per 1,000, but you’re going to get more attention if that’s true. So let’s go with the more conservative 1/1,000, or 0.1%.

Using that measure, we could have 793 spam complaints instead of the 8 that we had. So even using the more conservative measure, we had one-hundredth of the acceptable sinning. How is that? There are two tributaries that combine into one river: one is technical and the other is content.

“Technically” Avoiding Spam Filters

The technical answers are important, of course:

• Domain reputation (i.e., history, though this one is only a few years old).
• SPF, DKIM, DMARC (all of which we use).
• Spam testing (Barracuda is helpful; Outlook’s false positives render it useless and I just ignore them, always).
• The behavior of the other senders on the IP tree you occupy.
• Prominent unsubscribe links and full contact information.
• Use “send over time” instead of dumping the entire bunch into the ecosystem. We typically use 3 hours. I’m not convinced it matters too much, but who knows.
• Send at regular intervals (weekly, every two weeks, or every month), though I think when you send isn’t as important as people think.

I view those as table stakes. They are obvious and all worth doing. There are some other things in there, too, like double opt-in (we don’t use it), removing inactive users (we do it after a year), segmentation (we do none of that), personalization (we do none of that), not allowing domains your grandpa is still using (like AOL), etc.

There are a few things, too, that I think are just outdated and plain old bad advice, like limiting external links and images, which we use a lot of.

Summarizing, here, just follow as many of the known best practices that you can. But if that’s all you do, you’re still going to get spam complaints. By the way, I would read Dan Oshinsky and the team at Inbox Collective religiously, because they know what they are talking about.

The Real Answer to Email Etiquette

First, make sure your newsletter is not a letter full of news. Nobody cares about your recent hire, your newest case study, etc. If you must write about that stuff, it’s the perfect opportunity to segment your audience and send those issues to your clients, past and future employees, and the uncle who is ever so proud of what you’ve built. Everybody else should get solid insight and announcements that they will care about: an event, a new service offering, an acquisition, etc.

Second, don’t be a gross marketing bro. It’s thoroughly disgusting to over-promise, to use sensational headlines, to push people into buying, and to dangle “lead magnets” that turn into sorely disappointing experiences. Just don’t. Be an expert. Offer thoughtful commentary. Have opinions, but always with nuance and an openness to being wrong.

Third, and to expand on that last point, have a considered POV, but a definite one, wherever there is sufficient evidence to support it. Don’t be satisfied with people reading your stuff and moving on. Dabble with this experiment, instead: after someone reads multiple emails, be hopeful that they’ll start forwarding your stuff and recommending it…or unsubscribing. Anything that doesn’t hit the target is noise, and you want to be the signal or you would rather be silent (to the former subscriber). Engagement is the goal.

Fourth, always think of the reader. Don’t write for SEO (I don’t use any SEO tools and no idea where we stand), the entire article is in the email (they can click to read it online if they want, but I’m not looking for anything in return except for their engagement). Reduce friction, write human to human, trust your instincts, and pretend that other people are like you and hate the normal marketing bullshit just like you do.

Fifth and finally, I honestly don’t know how you’d pull this off unless you are tightly positioned. Only then will this unspoken pact between you and the audience work, and that’s the only way you’ll know what interests them.

Finally

You can have a very solid and high performing marketing plan without email, if that’s not your thing. But email is not dead. Nor is ungated content. If you contribute insight to your world, the search engines (traditional or AI-driven) will reward you. And if they don’t, figure something else out, but good things happen to people who generously contribute to their world.