The nine rules of legal distribution

Mailing is a good way to inform about project news, find new customers and re-engage those who have already become your customer once. But if you do not want to get the mark of a spammer, you should follow a few simple rules.

What is spam? This is 80% of mail traffic on the Internet and 20% efficiency . Normal, well-done mailing will be much more efficient. But even with the most good intentions, there is always the risk of falling into the purgatory of the Junk Mail folder. To avoid this, you need to take into account a number of nuances.

As usual, Sammari at the beginning of the article and further - detailed explanations. So, 9 simple rules :

Do not spam

If your letter looks like spam, smells like spam and tastes like spam, then most likely it is. No seriously. You did not come to the Internet yesterday and understand that what you are going to do (say) is spam. So do not do it, no matter how great the temptation. No matter how it sounds, but this is the only way to conduct an advertising campaign without complaints.
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How to prevent complaints?

In fact, receiving complaints from time to time is inevitable. We must be prepared for the fact that, having even a fully legitimate mailing list of fifty thousand people and having organized a quality mailing list, you will still receive one or two complaints. And this is the minimum. Sometimes, this is simply an erroneous user action, who thus wants to "unsubscribe" from the newsletter or hide an unwanted letter.

It is very easy for the user to put a few checkboxes in his mailbox and turn the list of objectionable letters into spam. He simply presses the "Spam" button in his inbox, not knowing that he is "knocking" on your company thereby, using it simply as a way to "unsubscribe" from the newsletter. And they do it! After all, the mail server blocks all emails from your server, having received a sufficient number of complaints about the same sender.

The easiest way is to contact a company that deals with mailing lists professionally, who knows all the weak points of advertising letters and who can work with both recipients and postal services (that is, to us :). If you want to do the mailing yourself or intend to provide this service to other organizations, then you will need our simple tips.

They are divided into two categories: this is work with users and protection from spam filters .

Work with users

What distinguishes a regular newsletter from spam? In fact, there is only one sign - the presence of a legally (that is, honestly) collected address base. The most important mistake in collecting such databases is the lack of personal permission from the user.

Legally collected address databases

Legality in this case means only one condition: the recipient of your newsletter had to subscribe to it (that is, express an unequivocal desire to receive it).

Distribution of advertising over telecommunication networks, including through the use of telephone, facsimile, mobile radio telephone communications, is allowed only with the prior consent of the subscriber or addressee to receive advertising. At the same time, an advertisement is deemed to be widespread without the prior consent of the subscriber or addressee, unless the distributor proves that such consent was obtained.
Federal Law "On Advertising"

If you have an online store, it means that you also have a user base, i.e. those people who did your shopping. When a profitable action or a series of discounts is planned, of course, there is a great temptation to immediately start sending out to the available addresses, but you must nevertheless ask for permission. Even if the recipients are your clients, do not send them letters without permission. When a person buys products from you, fills out questionnaires and provides information about himself, he absolutely does not count on the rough use of his mailbox for promotional purposes.

You should not write off email addresses from business cards or profiles. This information is not for distribution, but for other needs.

Receive confirmation of your willingness to receive your letters.

Confirm the subscription so that no one can subscribe to someone else's address.

Update your databases

Do you have a legal base of recipients, but you are too delayed with the mailing list? If a person has agreed to receive letters from you two years ago, then today the mailing will surprise him or even make him angry - you need to ask permission again. This is called the “re-engagement method.” He gives you proof that each person has given permission to the newsletter.

Avoid purchasing bases

Unisender 's anti-spamming policy rule: do not work with clients to send mail to purchased addresses. And we do not recommend this to you. Buying or renting lists is only a waste of money, which contradicts the recommendations of all anti-spam associations.

First, in any case, you will need to ask the addressee for consent to receive the newsletter - for example, sending them small letters telling you how you got their address and whether they wish to receive informational messages from you. But this is not a panacea - this list is probably bought by someone else. As a result, the same addressees receive every day a whole sea of unnecessary letters. At one point, he just marks them all with the necessary checkboxes and sends them to the scrap. In this case, your email account will also go there.

Secondly, it is ineffective - to do mailings, not knowing the history of this list (suppose you are doing a mailing about cars, and the list was going among motorcycle enthusiasts). And for the administration of postal services, the purchased base, even if the transaction itself was completely “white,” is not an argument. If you are suspected of spam, then only the confirmation of the user's consent to the newsletter will save you.

Keep confirmation of consent to the newsletter

If a spam message arrives from you, you are guilty until proven otherwise. After all, the main task of the e-mail service is to make the mailboxes of its customers clean. At the same time he has so many clients that there is absolutely no time to listen to the excuses and complaints of each of them.

However, as long as your mailing list is a legitimately collected base, and you can not hesitate to prove that every complaint is just a mistake - your situation can still be saved.
The best evidence will be a scan of a questionnaire with the client’s signature and ticked off “I want to receive offers by e-mail”, or information about registering it (date, name, IP) and the URL of the page where it was registered.

If you can’t confirm the legitimacy of your email collection methods, then your account will most likely not be unlocked.

Let's unsubscribe

Be sure to use the "Unsubscribe" button or link in each email. Most often they are present in letters in the form of inconspicuous links — and you need to make them noticeable and convenient — the idea is to make it easier for the user to press your button than the Spam button in the mail client. We, for example, automatically add a link to unsubscribe to our customers ’newsletters and process all failures on our own. The most important thing is to understand that your profit will not diminish from having such a button, but on the contrary, it will increase along with trust and reputation.

At the same time, it is not necessary to force the user to enter a login with a password, if your website or service requires registration - you already have enough of it to be stressed by the fact of sending, from which it needs to unsubscribe. If the recipient does not remember or does not want to enter login details, then the simplest option for him is, again, sending a letter to spam.

Do not repeat

If you send newsletters or other letters of the same type for too long, then you will most likely be reported as a spammer. It is only a matter of time.

Make out beautifully

Think of your recipient. Make beautifully designed letters that will look like this so that your company will appear to the user as respected and reliable. If you are not an artist or designer, hire a professional. Most mailing companies provide such services, including in the form of ready-made templates:

One of our templates

Cheap design, content with errors, tasteless design and motley font colors (see the rules for writing letters below) guarantee a lot of complaints and the subsequent ban.

Be open

Always make your mailing terms open. Tell people what, when and in what quantities you will send. If a person subscribes to weekly news, then in addition to this, it is no longer possible to send advertising services or reports about your promotions every four days. You will immediately turn into a spammer and a cheat. However, even if the newsletter was interesting to the person, he would still refuse your letters, preferring to read the news elsewhere. You need to clearly understand the difference between the newsletter (news) and the gross imposition of their services, advertising goods. Most likely, you will need to create two different lists of addresses - one for information, the other for advertising.

Anti-spam protection

On average, “due to” spam filters, about 10–20% of all emails disappear without a trace in email traffic. And all this is due to the fault of too zealous spam filters. You do not need to be a malicious spammer, so that your letters do not reach the recipients. Even those companies that send out the newsletter completely legally, with the permission and at the request of the addressee, with enviable regularity "fall under the distribution."

Alas, there is no quick and easy solution to the problem. To avoid filters, you need to understand their nature, understand how they work. And this process is very long and scrupulous.

E-mail programs have a very large list of criteria that filters are oriented to recognize the "junk" letter. The list includes primarily spam phrases. These include, for example: "ATTENTION, SALE !!!", "CLICK HERE AND YOU WILL BE A MILLION DOLLARS!". Recognizing one of these phrases (or very similar to it), the mail robot recycles the letter. Some criteria give more points, some less. For example, a sample of the analysis of criteria from SpamAssassin , the most popular spam filter in the world.

The letter will be placed in spam if it:

mentions winnings of huge sums of money (0.2 points);
asks why pay more? (1.25 points);
guarantees a refund for something (2 points);
contains an appeal about some urgent matter that is not urgent (2.9 points);
offers cheap mortgage or refinancing (3 points);
tells the secret of unprecedented success (2.4 points);

If your email contains spam amount above a certain threshold, it will be deleted. On each server, the administrator individually sets the bar. If the user is already fed up with junk mail, then the threshold will be set very low. In this case, almost all correspondence will be sent to the scrap.

The list of criteria for determining spam mentioned above is constantly growing, the filters themselves adapt to changes and new tricks of spammers. The list is updated each time a user clicks the “This is spam” button in his inbox. Spam filters can even synchronize work and share experiences online.

Signs of spam

What can be standard errors and how to avoid them? As a spammer, anti-spam systems also recognize the following features:

Avoid spamming phrases like “Click here!”, “Got a million in a minute!”
The abundance of exclamation marks in the headers and in the body of the letter
Abuse of the CAPS LOCK key (yes, yes :)
Bright colors of fonts, in particular, red, green (oh, yes!)
Incorrect coding
Using one large image instead of a text letter - when the image is not accompanied by a minimum amount of text, the letter is deleted recognized as spam.
Using the words "Test", "Hello", "Test", "Test" in the subject line of the letter - this error is made by those who conduct a test mailing within their corporate email
Sending one letter to multiple recipients within the same organization from a foreign address is a complicated option that no postal service can handle. It all depends on the company's system administrator.
Curved formatting - do not copy text from Microsoft Word directly to mail, text from Word in HTML format will not be displayed correctly. In particular, this applies to quotes, ellipsis. When sending emails, you can use the simple formatting option (for example, in Gmail) - plain HTML input. True, in this case all formatting and, most importantly, links will also disappear.
Sending too many emails per day. Most postal services do not allow sending more than 200 emails per day (at this rate, sending out to 50,000 addresses may be delayed :). In addition, if you rent a server from a shared-hosting, they can easily disable your account just by seeing an unusual surge in traffic. If you have a dedicated service, the host administration will respond only to complaints.
Our know-how - we run all emails before sending them via SpamAssassin, checking the extent of its “spamming”. If it exceeds a certain threshold, then we do not skip the newsletters and offer the client recommendations for its alteration. In the future we plan to screw this service online, then recommendations will be issued right when downloading the letter. An example of such a service .

Alarm bells

How to find out if the letters fall into the "Trash" or "Unwanted"? There are several ways - analysis of the statistics of opening letters or SMTP reports, but for ordinary users without the use of specialized software, they are not available. This is the prerogative of specialized services. About this - in our next article.

→ UniSender User Page

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/107127/

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