by Wikus Engelbrecht - GraphicMail Marketing Team
11. May 2011 21:58
Email newsletter marketers have had a rude awakening during the past three weeks with Gmail implementing its new, stricter rules for spam identification. With significantly tightened screening measures, suddenly you are more likely to see your sends condemned as spam than ever before. This latest salvo in the war against junk-mail has already caused much agitation amongst users and spells greater challenges ahead in the effort to ensure reliable email deliverability.
What has become clear is that Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo have all been amping-up their algorithms recently in an attempt to appease users and lower complaint levels. But unless you belong to the church of spam-agnosticism, it may just be that their heavy-handed approach is having the opposite effect on your email newsletter marketing campaign.
The new security protocols place an extreme amount of focus on content, taking into account areas relating to ISP reputation, and seeking to stop senders from regurgitating the exact same copy to large volumes of targets. With that said, the push to have variety and freshness in your promotional wording diet is what marketers have advised since the Big Bang. It’s a good habit to customize your content and provide several versions of the same text, and now things have changed so that your deliverability may be depending on this.
Anyone who has ever tried their hand at bulk email marketing will know that spam filtering is not simple and the same is true for being filter-conscious while building a campaign. Life would be much easier if the Gmail techs were to tweak their algorithm to tip the balance in the other direction (i.e. making their filters content-friendly) since it would be less effort to flag the occasional spam emails sneaking into our inboxes rather than needing to sift through lists of dubious emails to find important messages.
There's no escaping it. People will now need to more routinely run through the muck in their spam folder to find the info that they care about receiving, but that may have slipped into the junk bucket.
While the extra email house-keeping might provoke some all-round ire, the advantage for direct email marketers is that those who publish unique, quality content will be channelled to the trusted sender zone. Having tighter filters means that fewer potential email marketing competitors will be sharing the inbox and that customers can afford to take that little extra time in examining your emails, giving your influence and mind-presence greater traction.
“All big ESPs are now including reputation filters. This is not limited to sending IP and sending domain reputation. From address (friendly from) and from domain reputation is also becoming a very important factor in getting your mail out to your recipients.” - Shaun Swanepoel, GraphicMail Network Administrator
The final answer on how to work around email filters is always the same - make use of a reputable ESP and simply do not spam.
