As an email marketer, we believe that the best way you can avoid spamming your customers is by using something we call “honest common sense”. Here are a few examples of common sense when it comes to email marketing:

• Make your email recipient feelings more important than your need to market your products or services
• Hold your organization to the highest email marketing standards
• Vigorously - and immediately -- investigate any spam complaint you receive and provide a toll-free number for your recipients to air their spam complaints
• Keep meticulous track of your email addresses including bounces and unsubscribe requests
• Immediately honor your unsubscribe requests

Unfortunately, spam avoidance requires so much more than the points listed above. To help you navigate the minefield known as email marketing, we’ve included a checklist of good practices below from some of the top email marketing associations.

If you’re not sure your email will be considered spam, ask yourself the following questions:

• Are you uncertain that your email recipients have given you permission to contact them?
• Have you falsified your originating address or transmission path information?
• Have you used a third party or address or domain name without permission?
• Does your email subject line contain false or misleading information?
• Does your email fail to provide a working unsubscribe link?
• Is your unsubscribe link difficult to find?

If you answered “yes” to any of the questions above, you are in danger of being labeled a spammer by customers and ISPs. This will ruin your company reputation and land you on a blacklist.

The following is a list of 12 common sense ways to make certain your email doesn’t get counted as spam:

1. Personalize your email whenever possible
At the very minimum, use your recipient first and last names in the body of your email or in the subject line. In addition, use our whitelisting instructions to improve your delivery rates.

2. Follow federal and local spam guidelines
Since many states have their own spam statutes, each one may have their own definition of what unsolicited commercial email (spam) consists of. In addition to following local guidelines, make sure you’re compliant with Federal Can Spam regulations. Benchmark Email takes significant steps to ensure that all our clients are Can Spam compliant, but you should go even further by following good email marketing practices.

3. Practice double opt-in
Use double opt-in (closed-loop opt-in) email marketing practices. This means you’ll not only legitimately gather customer requests to send emails, but you’ll send your recipients a follow-up email that asks them to confirm their subscription. Double opt-in is the gold standard of permission-based email marketing practices and will bring you better delivery rates, a more-focused customer list, among other rewards. To find out more about double opt-in, click here.

4. Do not buy or rent email lists
Buying or renting a list is always a bad idea. The people on bought or rented lists have not given you specific permission to email them. These lists also often contain “spam traps” – email addresses used by ISPs to catch spammers. It only takes a single email to a spam trap to land your company on a blacklist and ruin your sender reputation, so avoid buying or renting email lists at all costs. Please note: Benchmark Email does not accept customers with bought or rented lists. To learn how to build your permission list, click here.

5. Keep your lists up to date
More than 30% of email addresses change every year. Of those addresses, many are “taken back” by ISPs and used as spam traps. So what was once considered a legitimate email address is now considered a spam trap. In other words, do you know how fresh your list is? Use this checklist to find out:

		How old is your list?
		Is your list permission based?
		When was the last time you sent email to your list?
		Has your list been maintained and properly cleansed of unsubscribe addresses?

If you list is more than six months old or you haven’t emailed your recipients for six months or more, consider sending your recipients a “remember me?” message asking them to click on a link to reconfirm that they’d like to receive emails from you.

6. Do not harvest email addresses
Email harvesting, or the practice of trolling Websites and making a list of visible email address is not only an unethical practice, it can bring you heavy fines – and worse – prison time. It’s also an easy way to get blacklisted. Please note that Benchmark Email does not take on customers who use harvesting to build lists.

7. If you inherit a list, do not assume you can send to the recipients
Suppose a co-worker gives you a list of email addresses and swears it is opt-in. That may be true, but have the recipients signed up to receive email from you specifically? Most likely, the answer is “no”. If you still believe the list recipients will want to receive you emails, send each of them an individual email (from your personal account) asking them if you can add them to your mailing list. Even though your final list will be smaller, you’ll have better delivery rates and better sales.

8. Think of timeliness when sending to your customers
If you have a list of customers who have bought items from your company in the past (as well as provided you their email address), feel free to email them. However, make absolutely certain that they are customers who purchased items from you within the last six months or so. If you choose to email your customers after they’ve last purchased items six or eight months ago, chances are some of those email addresses have changed and you could end up mailing to a spam trap. Use double opt-in and reconfirm your customer sign ups to solve this problem.

9. Consider frequency when sending to your customers
Sending multiple emails only days apart may not be illegal, but it will upset your recipients. The worst outcome? They’ll mark your email as spam, because, well, they’ll feel like you’re bothering them. Your best bet is to email your customers no more than once every week. Instead, concentrate on making each email as appealing as possible. And if your customers sign up to receive monthly emails from you, don’t change the game by emailing them more frequently than you promised.

10. Make your unsubscribe link and address easy to find
The Federal Can Spam act requires that all commercial emails include an accurate mailing address and an easy to find unsubscribe link. Make it easy for your customers to unsubscribe and it will boost the quality of your list. Benchmark Email automatically inserts an unsubscribe link in all customer emails.

11. Keep your list clean
Take the time to practice good list hygiene. This means that you must not only frequently purge your hard-bounced email addresses, but take care to remove duplicate addresses and emails that soft bounce over and over again. In other words, if an email comes back again and again with a message that the mailbox is full or the server is having technical problems, it’s time to take those customers off your list.

12. Be honest in your subject lines
Misleading your customers by using inaccurate or misleading subject lines is a sure way to get your emails sent to the spam file. It is also a direct violation of the Can Spam Act. Build up customer trust by delivering in your copy what you promise in your subject line.