Sending mass email is the most effective way to connect to customers. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the most common ways of getting an email campaign blacklisted. Being blacklisted doesn’t just ensure that your current campaign isn’t delivered  it can impact all of your future campaigns as well. To avoid getting blacklisted, you need to ensure the quality of your email, in addition to understanding how blacklisting works.

Make Sure Your List is Opt-In

Only send to users that have specifically opted into newsletters. When you can, you can even ask users when they want to get emailed, and what they want to get emailed about. Even if you may get fewer emails, you’ll have a more valuable list overall. The other side to this is that it should be very easy to opt out. When users can’t opt out, they instead mark your emails as spam or block them. This can get you blacklisted, filtered, and ignored.

Use Your Email Tracking Analytics

From the start, you should be tracking your click through rates and conversion rates. click through rates give you detailed information on how active your customers are. Low click through rates are a way that you can get blacklisted, as it indicates that your campaign isn’t valuable to your customers. If your click through rates are going down (or if they are lower than industry average), you may need to do some testing.

Avoid “Spammy” Keywords and Key Phrases

Keywords that are considered to be spammy, such as “one time only” or “sale” or “act now,” are almost always blacklisted. Though you can use these words once or twice, using them multiple times is a surefire way to get your emails filtered both on a server level and an email application level. Read through your emails carefully to make sure they aren’t too high pressure. Certain words, such as “payday loans,” are considered to be so spammy that you don’t even want to use them once.

Target Your Emails

If you integrate your customer relationship management and email marketing suites, you can target emails to specific groups of your users. By paring down to certain demographics, you can improve the chances that they will interact with your email rather than potentially opting out or blocking it. Getting customers to actually read and use your emails is the best method of avoiding blacklisting. Apart from actual blacklisting, each server also has a reputation. If your reputation goes down, the likelihood that your emails will be filtered out goes up.

Use the Right Email Host

Blacklisted emails are blacklisted based on the servers and domains that they come from, as it’s these servers that share a reputation. Mass email servers have often already built a reputation. If you’re just starting out, you can automatically get a better email reputation by using a shared server. You can easily create a campaign with MassMailer.io that already has a solid reputation.

While it may seem that sending mass email often leads to blacklisting, it’s also true that as long as your emails are valuable, you’re usually safe. Make sure that your emails are well-polished and well-written and target them to your audience. By using CRM solutions and analytics tracking  and avoiding certain keywords  you’ll be able to  drill down to the emails that your customers find most valuable.