In email marketing, a spam account is an email address used to send repetitive, unsolicited, and irrelevant messages to people who didn’t consent to receiving them. These accounts typically promote products or services in an intrusive and misleading way.
If your audience’s inbox providers flag your brand’s email address as a spam account, this can negatively affect your brand’s reputation, email deliverability rates, and marketing ROI.
How to avoid being flagged as a spam account
To prevent your brand’s email address from being labeled as a spam account, follow these steps:
1. Use a recognizable sender name
Make sure the email address you use to reach out to your audience reflects your brand by using a clear and recognizable sender name. You can do this by using a custom sending domain rather than a generic one assigned by an inbox provider like Gmail.
When you use a custom domain, your email address is displayed as info@yourbrandname.com or sales@yourbrandname.com, reinforcing your professional image. This helps subscribers immediately identify your emails and encourages them to open and engage with your messages.
2. Authenticate your email domain
Authenticating your email domain verifies that your messages come from your brand, improving your email deliverability and helping you avoid spam filters.
To authenticate your email, implement the appropriate protocols like SPF, DKIM, or DMARC to:
- Prove your emails are sent from authorized servers
- Attach a digital signature to your emails
- Protect your emails from phishing and spoofing attempts
3. Create a consistent sending schedule
Inbox providers use spam filters that monitor irregular sending schedules and the volume of messages sent from different email addresses. If you send too many emails simultaneously, these filters could flag your account and impact your deliverability rate.
You can avoid triggering the spam filter by sending your messages consistently, not in large, irregular batches, and maintaining a trustworthy sender reputation.
4. Only engage with opt-in subscribers
If your audience frequently receives irrelevant messages from you, they’ll likely mark them as spam. If this happens often enough, your brand’s email address can eventually be flagged as a spam account.
To avoid sending irrelevant emails to your audience segments, use a double opt-in form after the initial verification process to obtain your subscribers’ express consent to receive your messages.
Also, regularly monitor metrics like click rates to gauge your email performance. If you notice some recipients have never engaged or stopped engaging, use the sunset flow strategy to adjust the messages you send them.
5. Monitor your domain’s reputation
Email blocklists track domains with poor sender reputations and high bounce rates. If your domain ends up on these lists, your email address will likely be flagged as a spam account.
Regularly monitor email blocklists to ensure your domain isn’t listed. If it is, resolve the issues promptly by:
- Re-evaluating specific elements of your email practices, such as send times
- Cleaning up your email list
- Creating and dealing with unengaged segments
A reliable marketing automation platform like Klaviyo can help you implement anti-spam strategies to maintain a good deliverability rate and sender reputation.
Klaviyo helps you create double opt-in web forms to obtain express consent from your subscribers and make sure they’re genuinely interested in your messages. You can also use reporting and analytics to monitor engagement metrics and make data-driven decisions that improve your email deliverability.
Ready to boost your email deliverability and protect your sender reputation? Sign up for Klaviyo today.