Common Gmail Content Flags:

• It’s similar to messages that were detected by our spam filters.
• It contains content that’s typically used in spam messages.

If you have seen this message, it’s probably driven you mad! Is it my email authentication? Is my email domain banned?

What’s going on?

Why does it test OK? Mail-tester, Glock apps, the Postmark app, Isnotspam or whatever… said it was GOOD!

This isn’t actually Gmail’s ‘kiss of death’ message. That’s different, and I’ll write another post about that sometime. This is strictly a content issue. The contents of your emails contain words that are instant spam triggers AND Gmail hasn’t seen enough of you.

See, Gmail’s algorithm favors engagement. I could write a whole post about what kinds of engagement, but for now, just imagine replies, clicks, and opens as the important ones. Until it has seen a significant amount of this from YOUR domain, (IP address is irrelevant these days – unless you’re a spammer) you’re probably going to have to be careful at first, and slowly build reputation.

That’s another thing, you have to be super careful NOT to keep mailing when the engagement drops. What I mean is, when you mail say, 2,000 people, and the first 1,000 sends are opening at 12-14%… If you start to see that drop, you’ll want to stop and not let it keep mailing. If you get to the point where you’re seeing 2-3% open rates or lower, you know you’ve triggered their abuse flags. You’ll also want to be careful about speed of sending… but that’s not your issue here, so I digress.

Grab a few paragraphs of the bacon ipsum, and test that by sending to a gmail account. If it inboxes, you’ve got go back and re-write your original email. If you’re not familiar with lorem ipsum, and wondering what the heck bacon ipsum is… Well, back in the day someone borrowed a 1400’s poem to use as text filler on websites they were building. Of course, the lorem ipsum is used so much now that even spam filters know it’s junk.

OK let’s stop here for a moment. You probably don’t realize the value of the gem I’m dropping here. Most new mailers and marketers don’t have a nice cache of copy or content they KNOW will inbox; something they can copy, paste, and know always inboxes. If this inboxes, you know it’s your email and not your system. Are you picking up what I’m putting down?

I could steal a bunch of content from all over the web and put it in this article but (obviously) I won’t do that.

Hubspot has good industry guidelines for common keywords that will automatically throw you to spam. They include words like free, discount, money, while you sleep, etc. They’re common things Google knows are spam. If you use a ton of these words you will not inbox. If you have a strong reputation you MIGHT be able to inbox a few hundred of these, but if your engagement score drops… well you get the idea.

So, relax. Go re-write your email and get that promo out the door!

Don’t get fooled by a false positive!

Have multiple Gmail accounts to test that email you’re sending on. Each of these ‘test’ Gmail accounts are known as “seed accounts” in the email industry. Don’t spoil your seeds by accidentally creating engagement. By removing them from the spam box, replying to them, or clicking on the links you may accidentally teach YOUR Gmail account that you want this content.

That’s great for you, but you’ll stop seeing what cold Gmail accounts see!

If you’re looking for email advice, you might consider a training session. I’m pretty busy, but you can schedule a call through Clarity if you want specific advice.

Most businesses I speak to are doing everything in their power to pull as much revenue as possible from their lists. It can sometimes seem like every angle has been tested. However, I assure you they haven’t!

This is in no way meant to be a pitch, but simply the facts that prove having your email marketing done by even the most seasoned copywriter, information marketer, or direct-response marketer can cost you up to 30% of revenue!

Why experts and professionals fall short with email:

Many years ago I was running an email system for a membership site that enjoys over 8500 members. At the time they had a half million email addresses and we basically sent the whole list the newsletter every week, as well as, various segments on other days.

At the time, I assumed it was normal that people would go dormant, with hundreds of opt-outs every mailing.

I also couldn’t bear removing people, even if they hadn’t opened or clicked in a year.

Then, disaster struck… a subject line that didn’t agree with the list. We got a slightly higher than average unsubscribe rate which triggered an automated account ban.

Yeah, they actually DISABLED our account!

Do you back up your email lists? If you don’t, now’s a good time to do just that. Don’t think “that won’t happen to me.” Anyway, back to the story. This forced us ‘seasoned marketers’ (but novice email marketers way back in 2010) to seriously look at email server technology, list maintenance, and ESP (Email Service Provider) rules.

Most marketing agencies and long-time marketers don’t actually KNOW what the thresholds are at their ESP (Mailchimp, GetResponse, Infusionsoft, etc.) for getting booted. Not only that, they don’t realize that they’re likely not in-boxing well. This is because they don’t know how they’re viewed by Google, Hotmail, Yahoo, and other major email providers. Not knowing this is a killer.

So, how about we dig into the TOP 3 things most novice email marketers simply don’t know.

Sure there’s the obvious stuff like: not using certain spam trigger words, but it goes far deeper. Here are just SOME of the factors that can impact how Google/Yahoo/Hotmail and others see you:

• Mailing dormant email accounts
• Bots, spam traps, and aged accounts
• Sending too high or too low volume over certain periods
• Emailing invalid email addresses
• Getting too low open rates, click rates, and other engagement metrics
• Too many complaints

You might say to yourself: “wouldn’t my email provider just remove these?” Some don’t remove them, but they *do* suppress them. That means you’re not mailing them when you send, but you’re still paying for that in your total contacts in the system price. Others just boot you once you reach a certain threshold of complaints, bounces, etc.

Email experts have a plan for the constant scrubbing of these list dangers.

What’s an automation recipe you ask? Well, just imagine that with eCommerce there are MANY other scenarios, besides the obvious ‘cart abandon’, where you want to send reminders, or notifications, along the customer journey.

They can be used after a certain period of dormant opening or buying, or to remind/reward customers for certain behaviours.

We typically use seven standard automations for our eCommerce clients (and several more case-by-case ones.) I’m not trying to do the “us versus them” thing, but seasoned email marketers who have been around the block long enough will know exactly when, and what type of email to put in place, to keep the customer moving through the lifecycle for maximum revenue.

You know, in 2007 this was still the only thing marketers knew! Send out your “newsletter” every month, which is as outdated as submitting your site to Google for a better SEO. Heck, if that worked we’d all do it – but it doesn’t. I’m not saying you can’t get SOME results doing this, but it’s not the BEST way to get results.

In the last few years all the big marketers have been preaching segmentation. This is establishing smaller groups of your subscribers and buyers in order to speak to them differently than the whole mass. Segmentation produces FAR more revenue, opens, and results than what’s called ‘batch and blast’ or mailing your whole list with the same stuff.

I’d go on a rant about micro-segmentation, but I don’t think there’s time for that. Let’s just say people like to feel special… and not all people want the same things. There are automated and simplified ways to get people to put their hand up and say “I’m one of these” and be able to deliver a more customized sales funnel for those folks.

Some of the best segments are specific types of product users, obviously buyers, newbies of the product vs veterans of the product, and product evangelists. The obvious openers clickers and engaged… but the real secret juice is knowing when, where and how to segment and automate so it’s not more work.

Don’t neglect the back end.

StarWars films netted 7.5 billion dollars in sales, but merchandise netted 14 billion. There is more money in the back-end of your marketing systems than there will ever be in the front, if you’re doing it right.

Schedule a strategy session with one of our experts today! Email info@answerswanted.com for more information.

Subject lines play a crucial role in an email’s overall effectiveness. The ultimate goal of email marketing is to get people to open your emails. At what cost, though? Are there tactics that get huge open rates and cost you dearly? Well, yes, there are.

However, both the United States Can Spam Act of 2003 and the Canadian Internet Spam Law (CASL) strictly prohibit “deceptive subject lines.”

What is a deceptive subject line, anyway? How do I know if I’m using one?

First let’s dig into some examples of deceptive subject lines:

• FWD: Your invitation from us.
• RE: Your gift
• You left your coat at our place

These are classic examples of subject lines where it’s most likely deception. If you’re sending these to a bulk list it’s not a forward, a reply to an existing conversation, and it’s not a personal note about a forgotten item. It’s marketing.

1. According to several studies the click thru rate is almost zero when people feel cheated. If they’re not going to click on or take action on what you’ve got inside, why bother using this method to get them to open?
2. A sharp increase in complaints. Complaints can get you booted off your email platform and dramatically decrease your ability to reach inboxes and stay out of the spam box. Most providers consider 0.03% too high a complaint rate, so it’s not hard to reach that.
3. An increase in unsubscribes. People don’t like to be tricked or cheated. Not only will it decrease your list size and take great customers off your list, most email providers have a limit to how many unsubscribes they will consider acceptable before they boot you for too high an unsubscribe rate. For most providers around 1% is considered too high.
4. It’s illegal! Both in the United States and Canada (and many European countries) consider deceptive subject lines illegal and it’s certainly not worth battling a court case over a marketing campaign.

Use open loops.
An open loop is an incomplete idea. “This week the team gave me…” make them open the email to find out more.

Try using announcements or news items.
People love news and if you really do have news to share, it’s not lying.
“We’ve got an announcement to share”

Target a ‘pain point’.
“My emails were all hitting the spam box”
“She’s still not talking to me”
“Facebook frowns at this”

Use a personal letter.
“A letter from the CEO to customers”

Join our newsletter to receive our regular case studies (and spam-free emails) about sending more effective email marketing.

If you’re regularly sending email using your own email system, you may be familiar with a few of the best tools out there.

Here are some of my favorites:

• www.mail-tester.com
• www.isnotspam.com
• sendcheckit.com
• spamcheck.postmarkapp.com

I could get into the pros and cons of each of these (oh, and if you’re on my list, you’ll soon find out about a tool that does far more than any of these do) but bar-none, the best is mail-tester.com

The only quirky part is the Spam Assassin test. Every single test in that system is black and white. What they say to do, you can do and fix your score. Just not a Spam Assassin or bad Razor2 confidence score.

Ever see something like this?

RAZOR2_CF_RANGE_E8_51_100

RAZOR2_CF_RANGE_51_100

RAZOR2_CHECK

Email is NOT an exact science. Just because you get a 10/10 score on Mail-tester does NOT mean you’ll reach all the major ESP’s inboxes. Likewise, just because you’re score is lower or you’re getting a Razor2 error does NOT mean you’re going to have trouble inboxing.

There are far more factors involved.

Yes, you should TRY hard to adjust your content, take out ‘spammy’ words, try not to re-use the same test a million times, and attempt to get a good Spam Assassin score. Sometimes, that’s just not an option. In those cases, I’d recommend sending your email to AOL, Gmail, Comcast, Yahoo and other ‘seed’ accounts and seeing how you inbox there. If you do well, just mail and ignore Razor2.

If you don’t… Let’s say you use SMTP.com, SendGrid, Green Arrow, MailJet or similar and you’re just not able to get that score to go away.

The first thing you might want to check is your reputation score at SenderScore.org.

Sign up for a free account to get the comprehensive report. You really should be going in there every couple days anyway if you send heavy volume. Check the IP address of your email and see what kind of scores your getting.

Secondly, log into your account with your SMTP provider and remove click tracking and open tracking. Sometimes their signatures or domains are detected as spam senders and can give you a poor score. You may also want to check formatting, spelling, HTML validation and even if your software is putting an X-Priority header into your emails. All of those things can cause a Razor2 score as well.

SenderScore is a great resource but isn’t necessarily the exact ‘score’ that say Comcast or Yahoo would give you if they had such a score. Your reputation will have to build up slowly over time.

As long as you’re not sending to tons of unknown users, hard bounces or getting tons of spam complaints, don’t be afraid to let your rep score grow over time!

If you’re still stuck after trying all of that, consider a 1 hour consultation with one of our experts.