Overview
Following best practices helps prevent your recipients from marking email messages as spam. Spam is any email you send to someone who hasn’t given you their direct permission to contact them on the topic of the email.
Best practices
- Prepare your data.
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To prepare for sending emails, take some time to review the email addresses for individuals and agents in your AMS+ account to confirm they are up to date.
If you used another email system, update your AMS+ account with email addresses and opt-out decisions from the email system. You don't want to send e-mails to recipients that have already opted-out. This will go a long way to ensure your email deliverability and keep your spam and bounce rates low. Individual and Agent detail areas have a opt out flag to track opt-out decisions.
- Avoid the following to help prevent your email from ending up in spam.
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- Copy containing the terms "Free", "Guarantee", "Spam", "Credit Card"
- ALL CAPITAL LETTERS
- Excessive punctuation: !!!, ???
- Excessive use of: "click here"
- $$, and other symbols
- Don’t use rented or purchased lists.
- The people from a purchased list will not be expecting to receive an email from you and are more likely to mark a message as spam.
- Have an easy to find unsubscribe button.
- AMS+ automatically adds an unsubscribe button to the bottom of every email you send. If the party isn't interested in receiving email communications from your agency, we hope they'll unsubscribe rather than marking the message as 'Spam'.
- Email consistently, not sporadically.
- Try to be consistent by preparing an email schedule. If your audience hasn't heard from you in an extended amount of time, you may see less interest (open rates) and recipients may forget they even signed up to for your emails.
- Make certain the from name is someone your contact recognizes.
- This ensures that the recipient recognizes the sender name and does not mark the message as spam because it's unknown.
- Short and simple subject lines.
- Your subject should be around 5 to 8 words. Be sure to capitalize and punctuate carefully and avoid copying techniques you see on emails in your junk folder.
Spam, Bounce, & Thresholds
Each step you take to reduce the number of spam complaints helps ensure your messages get into the inbox. That may mean a more slow and steady approach to building your email list rather than a quick approach.
If you send emails to users who do not wish to be contacted, they will mark the messages as spam and you'll risk not being able to email your most valuable clients. More information on our Spam, Hard Bounce, and Thresholds can be found here: