Spam filters could be the biggest enemy of email marketers. Sending out spam could hurt your overall email deliverability or might even get your IP or domain blacklisted. This will result in all your emails being bounced or rejected by the recipient servers.
And this practically means the death of your email marketing strategy.
The question is could your customer support emails be flagged as spam? Are customer support emails spam-proof simply because customers have consented to receive them in the past?
You might find the answers to these questions if you open your spam folder. You’ll probably find some product updates or recommendations, newsletters, feedback/review requests, or any kind of email you might associate with customer support. This attests to the fact that customer support emails could be flagged as spam. Even permission-based email marketing could be flagged spam.
In this article, we start by explaining what spam filters are and how they function. Then we offer some ways to avoid spam filters when sending customer support emails.
What is spam?
Spam email is any kind of unsolicited email typically sent out in bulk to a large number of people without their permission.
Spams are usually sent to a list of people for the following acts:
- Phishing
- Spreading Malicious Software
- Lottery Scams
- Spreading Viruses
- Illegal Advertising
The history of spam goes far back to May 3rd, 1978, when Gary Thuerk, an American salesman, spammed almost 600 mailboxes, advertising a new model mainframe. Thuerk targeted email accounts that were connected to ARPANET, a then major network later merged into the Internet we know today. Thuerk’s lengthy email filled some of the recipients’ storage quota and sparked some backlash. But the internet was almost entirely unregulated at the time, leaving the angry network users not much to do in regards to legal action.
Today, almost 45 years later, spam technology and tactics have evolved. And of course, with time, spam laws were introduced and enforced as awareness around data security increased dramatically over the years.
Considering that phishing scams and spreading viruses can come in the form of pornographic content or an innocent-looking email from a service provider that is fake, ESPs are getting better at intercepting and blocking these emails.
Of course, marketers and salespeople must find ways to deliver their messages without spamming consumers. Depending on where your business is based, you’re obliged to enforce that jurisdiction’s spam laws, but not just because it’s an obligation.
Also because:
- Your IP or domain gets blacklisted
- Spam damages your brand image
- Spammy communication is not actually effective
So, how do you avoid ‘mark as spam’?
To avoid spam filters, let’s first understand how they work.
What are spam filters and how do they work?
Internet Service Providers like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook continuously develop filters to offer the best experience to their own customers, the account owners. All emails go under a scan to determine the spam score of the message based on two main criteria:
- sender domain/IP reputation
- content format
This means that even if you have a good domain/IP reputation, the content of your email is scanned to make sure it’s compliant. Spam filters compare the email subject and the headline, as well as the body text with a predefined bank of spam words to see if they match. If the email passes a certain score based on several criteria, then it’s safe.
There’s no explicit public knowledge about ISPs’ specific criteria, but we know some of the data they look at is shared:
1- Authenticity of the subject line
The CAN-SPAM act, which was enacted by the US Congress in 2003, like other spam laws that were brought into force in other countries, prohibits the use of misleading identity information and subject lines of deceptive nature.
One of the seven essential rules of the CAN-SPAM states that subject lines should be free of misleading email subject abbreviations like Fwd: or Re:, that falsely signal that there has been an ongoing conversation between the sender and the recipient.
Another authenticity indicator is the harmony between the subject line and the body content. If the actual content is different from what you promise in the subject line, it’s considered having a deceptive nature. And there’s a good likelihood that the recipients will report those types of emails, because you’re stealing their time.
2- Easy unsubscribe option
Not offering the recipients an unsubscribe button or link in the body text is against the spam law enforced in every country.
But some countries grant business owners more days to process an opt-out request.
Keep in mind that your audience won’t enjoy being kept in against their wishes. Mailboxes are personal spaces that must be respected. So always include an unsubscription option in your emails.
3- The consent
As consumers are growingly aware and concerned about data privacy, the practice of buying or renting email databases is leveling down from not effective to harmful. Marketers and salespeople receive countless promotional emails every day about reports, research, educational content, lead lists, B2B tools, and so on. Since those emails have the nature of not stopping, most professionals find it easier to report spam from early on.
Since its establishment in 2016, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has set regulations regarding collecting and using consumers’ personal data. Its rules apply throughout the EU, which means that anyone sending email to this region must follow the regulations.
By requiring firms to be honest about how they use personal data, the GDPR intends to give EU citizens more control over their data. Businesses operating in the EU must adhere to the GDPR’s stringent data processing rules, which include where and how personal data is held and used, as well as ensuring the data’s security.
Both on the account that firstly law calls for consent and secondly that people are increasingly aware of the issue, not asking for consent will be damaging to your brand in the long run.
Keep in mind the fact that if customers have given you contact information for a certain event, business conversation, or any other type of communication outside the promotional context, you still need their permission to use that info for promotional purposes.
4- Open and reply rates
Open and reply rates reflect how much your audience engages with your content. Spam filters use these metrics to determine the relevance of your content to your audience, so low open and reply rates would lead to being flagged as a spammer.
The most effective way to keep your open/reply rates high is getting to know your customers and sending them engaging emails.
Use every opportunity to learn more about your customers. Ask their feedback in regards to different issues frequently. Send them surveys and reward them for completing them. Use customer intelligence tools to gather customer data from various touchpoints and analyze them to find insights.
Seasoned marketers would know that this process takes time, but you can always achieve a certain level of success in open and reply rates by remembering this simple assumption: there’s no point in keeping people who are not interested in your business. Therefore you need to regularly clean up your email list and make sure to exclude people with no sign of interest in your previous campaigns. Run your contact list through an email validation tool such as ZeroBounce to screen out invalid email addresses. Run re-engagement campaigns and remove the contacts that are no longer willing to hear from you. Here’s an example:
How to make sure customer support emails don’t hit spam:
All of the points above will help you better comply with the standards. But in the final section, we’ll dive deep into what to consider when sending customer support emails.
1- Keep customer support emails about … customers
By now you should have understood that engagement is the most important element in email marketing. You want your subscribers to open your emails, go through them, and follow your CTA’s. This will inevitably improve your domain reputation and ensure high deliverability.
To keep your email engagement high you really need to understand your customers’ expectations and fulfill those expectations to the best of your capabilities.
This goes two ways in both freedom from things that are uncalled for and supply of the things they desire and need. For instance, if you’re displaying a subscribe to our monthly newsletter form here and there on your website, you shouldn’t send out biweekly newsletters to those who fill it. So in a sense, they should have the freedom from things that they haven’t signed up for.
You can’t just send out content that is simply empty, superficial, or clickbait, it will put you on the wrong side in customers’ minds and in the spam category eventually. It’s a good idea to take advantage of user story software tools to visualize and understand how your customers interact with your product and what they expect to achieve with it.
More importantly though, there lies an opportunity to turn your customer support emails into a marketing effort.
If you deliver excellent customer service emails that both solve customers’ problems fastly, more customers will continue their communication over email. They won’t go looking for your phone number after not receiving a reply from you for hours. In time, customers replying to your customer support emails will improve your IP score and help you avoid spam filters.
2- Constantly monitor overall reputation and deliverability
Let’s say you did your best to understand your subscribers and fulfill their expectations. You might still not get results. How do you measure the success rate of all of your efforts?
The first KPI you must track is your IP reputation. You can use various tools like Google Postmaster to monitor your IP reputation, get improvement suggestions and apply them in your campaigns.
If you want to try provoking or a language that is perhaps on the promotional side but are afraid of the possible negative outcomes, you can use email testing tools or email deliverability tools like Mailtrap that check the spamminess of your emails and never risk your IP score.
Don’t forget that if you’re using an ESP (email service provider), you’re sending out emails from their IP and therefore it impacts the deliverability of your messages. Consider this when choosing an ESP.
Chatra is an all-in-one customer service platform that allows you to send customer support emails alongside live chat and social messaging. Our compliance with data protection regulations such as GDPR ensures higher deliverability and protection from spam filters.
One contributor to an IP address’s reputation is third-party certification. Consider getting sender accreditation from reliable third-party organizations.
You can try the following methods to authenticate your emails:
- Sender Policy Framework (SPF) confirms your identity by comparing the sender’s IP with a list of IPs authorized to send from that domain.
- Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) guarantees that email is not tampered at any point during the transmission/sending process.
- Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) requires both DKIM and SPF to guarantee more accuracy in authentication.
- Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) ensures that your business logo is attached to your emails, to assure familiarity.
3- Offer people the freedom to update their preferences seamlessly
Provide a platform/landing page where subscribers can easily make changes in their preference settings. Why, you might wonder? Wouldn’t it ease opting-out too much and result in a loss of touch?
That’s not the case. Let’s say that you want to announce a feature launch to customers who previously requested that in a support ticket.
Now imagine a person that doesn’t like receiving those types of announcement emails, and one that would love to be kept updated about the addition they requested.
What if you provided them with a platform like this one:
This way, you could also give them the freedom to adjust their preference settings based on how much they’re interested in the campaign. While one person might be more interested in your newsletter or finding out how a new feature works, others might want to hear more about consumer electronics deals.
Finally:
To avoid being flagged as spam, you need to get familiar with spam filters and how they function. Some important practices such as adding people to your contact list with their consent, keeping your email subject line and body authentic, including an unsubscription option, and keeping your engagement metrics high are quite standard in email marketing.
For customer support emails it’s important that you keep them entirely about your customers. Bear in mind that every one of your customer support emails should contribute to your customer engagement and customer happiness. Constantly monitor your email deliverability and improve it by cleaning your contact list, and finally offer people the freedom to update their preferences even for what kind of content they should receive from you.
Author bio:
Mostafa Dastras has written for some companies such as HubSpot, WordStream, SmartInsights, LeadPages, and MarketingProfs. Over the past years, his clients have primarily relied on him for increasing organic traffic and generating leads through outreach campaigns. Visit his blog, LiveaBusinessLife, or connect with him on LinkedIn to get him to work with you.
