Avoid Spam Triggers and Boost Email Deliverability

Are your emails landing in spam folders? Don’t worry—this guide will help. We’ll explain common spam triggers and show you how to avoid them.

Learn how to improve your email content, secure your domain’s reputation, and enhance deliverability. With these tips, your emails will reach your audience effectively.

Certain provocative words or word combinations can give rise to the suspicion of SPAM. These are words such as eroticism or money. They also include combinations such as lose weight fast  or get rich quick.

In the same way, numbers with certain words can also lead to your emails being classified as SPAM at web.de, gmail.com, icloud.com, for example. A good example of this is a phrase such as Lose 3 kg in 10 days. Repetitions of characters, i.e. 999 possibilities, $$$  etc. can also lead to suspicion of SPAM. It is therefore important to avoid these.

If you send more than 2 - 3 emails per day to a contact, this can result in classification as SPAM. Try to avoid this. This is particularly important if the emails are purely informational or advertising emails. This looks dubious to the customer and the email providers don't like it either.

Make sure that you only use links to URLs that begin with https://. This shows the email provider that the link leads to a secure page. The older http://-Protokoll is classified as unsafe in many common browsers. This is acknowledged with a corresponding warning.

Email providers must be able to verify an email using a key. There are so-called DKIM entries for this purpose, which are set in the DNS entries of your provider. If this key is missing, your emails can quickly be classified as SPAM.

For Enterprise customers, we set this DKIM entry when setting up the server. Standard, Premium or Deluxe customers set the DNS entries for this with their hoster.

Do not use too many links in your emails that lead to different websites. Email providers often interpret these emails as “SPAM slingshots”.

Links in emails must not lead to websites that are on a blacklist. Otherwise this can lead to automatic SPAM complaints from email providers. Various tools, such as https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx, can be used to check whether a domain is on a blacklist.

Some virus protection programs also issue a warning when such sites are visited.

The “reputation” of a sending domain and its IP address can fall. The reasons for this are usually many SPAM complaints and incorrect hard bounces. The lower the reputation on a scale of 0 to 100, the lower the delivery rate. This means that fewer emails are delivered by the email providers.

Our customers come from different countries with different legal forms. There are therefore many different requirements. According to this document from the Certified Sender Alliance, the legal notice must include an email address and another contact channel.

We are not legal experts and therefore cannot provide legally binding advice. We recommend that you seek competent advice from a data protection expert for the legal notice.

In the footer, you should mention why the contact is receiving the email:“You are receiving our weekly newsletter because you registered for it in the customer area of our website and confirmed this on (placeholder "Confirmation date" - %Subscriber:SubscriptionDate%) from the IP address (placeholder "IP address of confirmation" - %Subscriber:SubscriptionIP%)”.

See also the information under point 6. All domains that are on a blacklist are considered “spammy”. Emails sent via this sending domain cannot be delivered.

Spam traps are non-existent email addresses that look like normal email addresses. They are put into circulation by email providers in order to identify spam sending domains. It is therefore important to always use the double opt-in procedure. Here, an email is sent to confirm the email address. This prevents SPAM traps from entering the ContactCloud's own database.

The ISPs know exactly which users log into their account and which do not. If users who have not logged in for 6 months receive an email from KlickTipp, the ISP can respond with an automatic SPAM complaint. This is the case with t-online, for example, but also with other providers.