Best practices to prevent your Sell email messages from being flagged as spam

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The amount of email messages sent from your Sell account and the quality of the content you include in your email messages are factors that influence spam filters. A negative spam score may prevent your email messages from reaching your customers.

This article provides best practices for preventing the automated email messages you send from your Sell account being flagged as spam.

This article covers the following topics:

• Factors that influence the spam score
• Best practices to avoid spam filters

Related articles:

• Sell email resource guide

Factors that influence the spam score

Here are the key factors that influence how spam filters score email messages.

• Your email domain's reputation. If you're sending more email messages than recommended (see the next section), your email domain's reputation will be negatively impacted.
• A sudden increase in email message volume. If you're planning to engage with many customers via email, it's best to start slow and ramp up over time.
• The quality of your email content. The words you use in the message subject and body, as well as the formatting, can negatively affect your spam score. To create automated messages to multiple customers, you should use merge tags (see Using merge tags in your email messages) and follow the content guidelines described in the next section.
• The open and reply rates of your automated emails. It's best to monitor the usage date of your email sequences (see Monitoring email sequence usage) and do not engage more prospects in email sequences that have low engagement.
• Links. Links that are included in your messages should also be from trusted domains with good reputations and follow standard formatting.

Best practices to avoid spam filters

Here are guidelines for helping to ensure that your automated email messages are prevented from being blocked by a spam filter.

Managing email message volume

By default, Sell limits you to 300 sent email messages per Sell user per day. That limit can be increased, but not indefinitely (see How do I increase my Sell email limit?).

The best practice is send no more than 2500 emails per user per week (that's 500 messages per day, if you only count weekdays) with the absolute maximum of 5000 messages per user per week. Beyond 5000 messages a week is considered a bad practice and will negatively impact your reputation.

Preparing Sell email templates and sequences

• Include a physical address in your footer. An address in your footer allows spam filters to associate the email with a legitimate business.
• Always add an unsubscribe link to your email templates in sequences. The checkbox for this option is selected by default when configuring new sequences and it is strongly recommended not to turn it off . You can also change the language of the unsubscribe link (see the Optional add unsubscribe link to emails step in the Setting up email and task sequences in Sell).

  Note: In some jurisdictions you are legally bound to include an unsubscribe link in your email.
• When creating email message content, follow these guidelines:
  • Avoid using all caps.
  • Don't use an excessive amount of exclamation points.
  • Don't embed video or Javascript code.
  • Avoid large attachments and attachment types that may be flagged as suspicious (.exe, .zip, .swf, etc.).
  • Don't use spam trigger words and phishing phrases (WIN, Free!, etc.).
  • Maintain a good text to image ratio. Don't use an overwhelming number of images or extremely large images.

Sending email messages

• Don't send more than the recommended 2500 emails per user per week (as noted above).
• When you want to increase the number of prospects you engage with weekly, increase the number of recipients gradually.
• If you want to start an email sequence for many leads at once, do it in bunches of 100-150 leads every hour.
• Send your email messages from a personalized email address, not a generic one such as [e-mail].

Monitoring your sequences and sender reputation

• Monitor the open and click rates of your sequences (Monitoring email sequence usage), work to improve them, and stop using ineffective sequences.
• Monitor your sender reputation. Use websites such as Sender Score or MX Toolbox, which will tell you if your mail server IP is listed on any popular spam blocklists.