What is one thing you should do when a message you sent was blocked by a bulk email filter?
To help you navigate through the digital landscape of email filters, we asked digital marketing experts and IT professionals this question for their best tips. From composing your email message carefully to onboarding new subscribers to whitelist your address, there are several insights that may help you to avoid having your email communications blocked.
Here are nine tips for what to do when your email gets blocked by a bulk spam filter:
- Compose your Email Message Carefully
- Run your Email Through a Spam Test
- Remove any Explicit or Blacklisted Content
- Ensure You’re Labeled as a Trusted Sender
- Avoid Common Spam Language & Phrases
- Utilize Tools & Apps to Determine Deliverability
- Review Attachments & Links
- Directly Communicate with your Subscribers
- Onboard New Subscribers to Whitelist your Address
Compose your Email Message Carefully
You can prevent your message from being blocked by a bulk email filter by composing your message carefully. The message shouldn’t look like a robot wrote it. Your message should include the recipient’s name and designation. This will help differentiate your content from spam emails. Email filters have a threshold. If that threshold gets crossed, the email gets sent to spam. You shouldn’t compose the entire email in capital letters or make grammatical errors. This ensures your message lands in the mailbox instead of in the spam folder.
Aviad Faruz, Faruzo
Run your Email Through a Spam Test
Certain emails can be flagged as “spam” because the content within them alerts the email provider to consider the language to be spam related, so it will automatically put that email in the spam folder. One way you can avoid this from happening is before sending off your email, you can run it through a design and spam test.
This test ultimately will run that email through a variety of spam content filters to see if anything is flagged, so you can change any prohibited language before sending, hopefully avoiding your email being put into the spam folder in future.
Tracey Beveridge, Personnel Checks
Remove any Explicit or Blacklisted Content
The best thing to do is check and/or remove the content of your message. As a first step, you should check to see if the message contains any of the blacklisted keywords. If so, you will need to remove these words from the text before resending your message. Additionally, ensure that all images in your message are appropriate for public viewing and do not include offensive or vulgar content.
If you’re sure the content is okay, remove the content from your messages and start over. This will help to avoid any potential damage to your reputation or business relationship. Contact your email provider for more information about their filters and how you can unblock specific messages.
Johannes Larsson, Junis Group Ltd
Ensure You’re Labeled as a Trusted Sender
Checking your mailing list and asking recipients to add you to their list of trusted senders are some of the things you should do when a message you sent is blocked by a bulk email filter. Make sure all the addresses on your mailing list are up-to-date if you frequently send out messages to a broad audience. Many email service providers’ spam filtering algorithms take into account the proportion of active to dormant email addresses on recipient lists.
Therefore, spam filters will flag a significant number of email addresses that seem inactive and may block your message as a result. Most email providers allow their clients to supply a list of sender addresses that will not be flagged as spam. This list is referred to as a “whitelist” or “allowlist” in most cases. Having someone add you to this list in their email account may probably fix the issue if they consistently claim that they aren’t receiving your emails.
Maneesh Sharma, Donorbox
Avoid Common Spam Language & Phrases
The one thing you should do is review the contents of the email and check to see if you used any words or phrases that will typically trigger an automatic spam filter. Some common examples of this are “Special promotion”, “Free”, “Click here”, “Congratulations”, etc.
And while these trigger words tend to vary with time, you can often perform a quick internet search to identify the most “spammy” words and work to eliminate them from your email content.
You should also avoid sending attachments to people that you may not have previously contacted before, as some spam filters tend to block any cold emails with potentially harmful content to protect the receiver. In most cases, a better alternative is to attach an external link to the file within the email, instead.
Jory Hunga, iPaydayLoans
Utilize Tools & Apps to Determine Deliverability
One of the most used communication methods now is through emails, especially in businesses. Whether it’s to converse with our business partners, customers, and employees, we’re using email so it’s only natural that we want our sent emails to be received by the other party. However, there are times that the emails we send get filtered out or blocked without us knowing. What we are doing is utilizing applications like GlockApps to determine the deliverability of our email and identify the spam score.
GlockApps and similar programs can help us figure out if our email was delivered and specify what’s lacking, what’s excessive, and what the errors are in our communication.
Commonly, the ISPs were the ones automatically blocking email from suspicious senders. That’s why using applications like this as tools to aid in improving the content and deliverability of email, as well as reducing the spam score of our emails sent can help ISPs to recognize our organization’s email addresses.
Franceen San Andres, CocoLoan
Review Attachments & Links
First, you should review your email’s content. Sometimes bulk email filters will block emails that appear to contain spam-looking content. This could be a suspicious attachment or a link that no longer works. If your email contains attachments or links, check them out before hitting send. Make sure the images and websites work. There’s occasionally an error without you even realizing it. Due diligence should help prevent your messages from getting blocked.
Michael Bell, Manukora
Directly Communicate with your Subscribers
Companies these days are all prepared with spam filters. For instance, a person who wants to declutter their professional email could set up a filter. This can help segment emails as per priority. You need to add a tag with the word ‘business’. This method would send all emails with this word to the spam folder. It would be best to ask your subscribers to add email addresses from your website’s domain to the safe sender list. This makes sure that your email wouldn’t end up in spam. You can address your subscribers to make the required changes through an introduction email.
Cristina Cason, Texas Family Homebuyers
Onboard New Subscribers to Whitelist your Address
When new subscribers sign up to your email list, send them a welcome email with a short but clear message or tutorial showing how to whitelist your email address. Even better, make a simple video tutorial, so they have a visual guide to follow. Be sure to show in the video how whitelisting is done on the major email platforms and to explain the benefits of adding your email address to their list of approved senders.
Ruth Novales, Fortis Medical Billing Professionals