There is one particular term that strikes fear in the hearts of email marketing professionals: SPAM. It refers to whether or not your email will be delivered. In other words, will your email make it into the inboxes of your subscribers, or will it be flagged as spam and sent straight to the junk folder?
The only way you can answer this question is by running a test that examines whether your email will be dumped and sent to the spam folder or if it will actually reach your customers’ inboxes.
Let’s talk a little more about spam test and why is important that you always run one before sending your campaigns.
What is a spam test?
Spam testing is the process of testing and examining whether an email message will be flagged as spam by email providers and ISPs. If a spam test is successful, it means your email is less likely to be flagged and blocked by spam filters. The results of your spam test will determine whether your emails reach subscribers’ inboxes or not.
If you don’t perform a spam test before sending out an email campaign, it might be flagged as spam and sent straight to the junk folder. This can significantly reduce the number of customers who receive your campaign and hurt your open and click-through rates.
Why could my emails be flagged as spam?
There are a number of reasons why this could happen. It’s important, therefore, to run spam tests and remedy any issues that may show up in the results.
Here are a few reasons why your emails could be flagged as spam:
- Spam-like content: using a lot of exclamation points and caps in an email is a habit that spammers have. So if you also do this, be ready for your emails to be targeted at by spam filters.
- Using aggressive or deceptive subject lines – Be careful not to use aggressive or deceptive subject lines. This could trigger spam filters and cause your campaigns to be sent to spam folders.
- Excessive frequency – Be careful how often you send emails. Sending too many emails too frequently could cause your campaigns to be considered as spam.
- Poor reputation – If you’ve sent spammy content in the past, this could influence email providers to flag your future newsletters as spam.
- Little email personalization: addressing to your customers by their names instead of “dear user” or “dear customer” can give you extra credibility.
- Too many images/links: flooding your campaign with a lot of images and links can play against you since spammers tend to use a lot of graphics to deceive their victims.
- Broken links: spammer usually use false and broken links just to make it look as if there were real content. Make sure to check any typos on your links and test that they redirect to a real and protected URL.
Running a Spam Test with MailMonitor’s Seed List
We count with a professional App that will give you all the critical information you need to know about your ca, so you can fix any issues before hitting send.
You can easily run a spam test by following these steps.
- Go to our Website App and login with your MailMonitor account.
- Go to the right menu and under Delivery Monitors you will find Seed Test. Here you will be able to see all your seed tests results.
- In order to get your unique Seed List, go to the upper right corner on the screen and click on the “Setup” button.
- Choose the validation method that you feel more comfortable with and configure your Seed Lists by checking the options that apply best to your needs.
- Once you complete Step 4, the app will generate a Seed List for you. Click download to get a file with all the addresses generated.
- Go to the email marketing platform that you’re currently using and add the addresses to your contact lists.
- Now you can start running spam tests with the validation method that you chose before. You will be getting the results from 15 to 20 minutes.
How to Interpret Spam Test Results
There are a few things to look for in your spam test results to determine whether your campaign will be flagged as spam:
- Delivered. The first thing to look for is the total number of emails that were tested and delivered. Ideally, if you get a large number of addresses in your Seed list sample as Delivered, you can be confident that your campaign will be delivered to the inboxes of your subscribers. Otherwise you will see a segment of your Seed list flagged as Missing.
- Flagged as Spam. Be careful when looking at the emails that were flagged as spam. If a large number of them were sent to the spam folder, you’ll want to figure out why and make any necessary changes.
If most of your emails are delivered to the inboxes of your seed list you can then use these to test your wider email address list or proceed with sending your campaign.
Ways to avoid being flagged as spam
There are a few ways you can avoid your being flagged as spam. Here are a few tips to keep in mind when running a spam test:
- Make sure you’re following all email marketing best practices. These include things like avoiding spammy or deceptive subject lines, typos and broken links.
- Always be sure to scrub your email lists. This means making sure you have correct email addresses. You don’t want to send emails to people who didn’t sign up for your newsletter in the first place.
- High frequency. Be careful not to send emails too often. If you do so, your subscribers may start flagging you as spam.
- Don’t send emails to people who didn’t sign up for your newsletter. This is a surefire way to get targeted by the spam filter.
As long as you follow these tips and run a spam test before sending your next email campaign, you won’t have to worry about your emails being flagged as spam.
