by Jim Kinkade

Created on: February 20, 2009

One of the most effective ways to fight spam is to practice legitimate email marketing. In order to do that, the email marketer should use email marketing software that enables message personalization. When more legitimate email marketers begin to follow email marketing best practices, spammers become easier to identify and block. Email marketing tools that allow marketers to personalize email messages help with several of good email practices at one time.

Confirming subscribers is essential to maintaining a good email reputation. It not only protects the subscriber from being signed up annonymously by a third party, it protects the marketers email list, ensuring that only those people who truly want to receive email message are included in the list. Confirming is simple, when someone enters an email on a web form to subscribe, simply send them an email with a link to verify that they truly do want to sign up. The marketer is responsible to send email messages only to those who have confirmed.

This in important because it keeps email lists free from both bogus email addresses and from people who are likely to report the email as spam. An email blast with a large proportion of failed emails will cause consternation with the recipient email clients. Big ISPs like Yahoo, AOL, and MSN do not like to get a lot of delivery attempts from one mail server that fails and will end up blocking that domain. Frequently that information is passed along to other small ISPs who will also block that server.

The report as spam button does the same thing, it tells the recipient ISPs that the email is unwanted. If engough people complaign about a particular mail server sending unwanted emails, that server will be blocked. Once blocked it is difficult to get removed. A good email marketing program will help manage both the complaints and the failed emails to prevent redelivery and maintain clean email lists.

Permission based email marketing programs allow you to fully engage subscribers in email conversations. Using the information collected during the subscription process, the savvy marketer can target the email to individual needs even while sending bulk email blasts. Engaging the subscriber minimizes the possibility of them using the report as spam button on their account and increases responses, whether it is simply opening and reading the email, or responding to it in some manner.

Honoring unsubscribe requests is also key to maintaining a good email reputation. According to the CAN-SPAM Act, unsubscribes must be honored no matter how they are sent. A good email marketing program enables the marketer to automatically filter out unsubscribe requests to ensure that those people never receive another email they do not want. Someone who unsubscribes and receives another message will reach for the report as spam button instead of notifying the sender again.

Email marketers who follow these guidelines separate themselves from spammers, thus making spammers easier to identify. Once spammers are isolated from legitimate email marketers, they can be identified and shut down more readily. The entire culture of email communications must change in order for spam to be eradicated. Unfortunately, too many email marketers do not take the time to do the things necessary to keep themselves from looking like spammers and being treated as such.

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