• Explain what spam is
• Give a clear example
• Share the top 10 reasons why sending it is a bad idea for your brand and your audience

What is spam?

Spam is any email someone didn’t ask for or want. Whether you use email for work or personal reasons, you have probably seen plenty of it. As marketers, it can be tempting to send mass emails to reach more people. But that approach can do more harm than good. 

Let’s look at why.

Example of email spam

Imagine you signed up for a newsletter about productivity apps. A few weeks later, you start getting dozens of emails from unrelated companies, like fitness supplements, travel deals, or random software offers. 

These messages clutter your inbox, waste your time, and make it harder to see the emails you actually care about. This is spam, and it is exactly what you want to avoid sending as a brand.

10 reasons to avoid sending spam emails

1. It annoys potential customers

Nobody likes getting emails they didn’t sign up for. People already get hundreds of email messages every day and don’t want to waste time on irrelevant content. When you send spam, you risk frustrating the people you are trying to reach.

2. It’s against privacy laws

Sending spam can get you into serious trouble. For example, regulations such as Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) and other privacy laws are in place to protect consumers and businesses from the misuse of digital technology.

To avoid legal headaches, follow your region’s email marketing rules. By respecting privacy and being transparent, you build trust and protect your brand.

3. It’s unethical

Spamming doesn’t just break rules. It’s unfair to recipients too. It wastes their time and resources. Remember, many email users pay for their internet service based on usage or time spent online. 

So when you send your unsolicited email, you’re essentially imposing financial costs on others. This unethical practice reflects badly on the sender and can seriously damage the integrity of your brand and relationship with your customers.

4. You’ll lose customer trust

Customer trust is important for strengthening relationships, driving customer loyalty, and promoting positive word-of-mouth. But spam makes your brand feel careless or intrusive, which can lead customers to take action like:

• Unsubscribing from your emails
• Reporting your emails
• Stop engaging with you altogether

To keep the trust of your customers, always get permission before emailing someone. Tell people what they will receive and how often. When your emails are welcome, relevant, and personal, you’ll earn loyalty and better engagement.

5. Disappointing marketing results

Spam emails don’t perform well. They often end up in spam folders where no one sees them. And even if they reach inboxes, they’re unlikely to get clicks or conversions. Instead, focus on consent-based marketing.

Investing time and resources into a marketing strategy that spams people is a waste of time and effort.

6. It’s malicious

Some spam emails contain malware, unsafe links or phishing attempts. These can damage devices or steal personal data. Even if your emails are safe, being associated with spam makes people wary of your brand.

7. It’s not targeted

Spam ignores who recipients are and what they care about, which isn’t how successful email marketing works.

Instead, you should you should personalize your emails by segmenting your mailing lists and sending targeted messages. With this approach, you can deliver tailored content that resonates with your audience. When people feel understood, they are more likely to engage.

8. It lowers deliverability for genuine emails

Sending too many spam-like emails from your domain can hurt your ability to reach inboxes. Internet service providers (ISPs) monitor sending behavior closely. If they detect high volumes of unsolicited email, they may flag your domain or IP address. This can affect even your legitimate campaigns, meaning emails people have opted into might land in spam folders instead of the inbox. 

Over time, this can:

• Reduce engagement
• Make it harder to communicate with your audience
• Undermine the performance of your email marketing overall

9. It has a low ROI

Spam rarely delivers meaningful results. For example, some studies show spammers might need to send thousands of emails just to get a single click or response. That’s a huge investment of time, effort, and resources for almost no payoff. 

In contrast, campaigns carried out with a proper email marketing platform can achieve much higher engagement and ROI. 

Focusing on quality over quantity helps your emails:

• Reach the people who actually care
• Improves campaign performance
• Protects your brand’s reputation

10. It damages your brand reputation

Once people label you as a spammer, it can be very hard to recover. Spam makes your brand look careless, untrustworthy, or unprofessional. Even if the content of your emails is good, being associated with spam can leave a lasting negative impression. 

Building a strong reputation takes time, and one poorly targeted campaign can undo a lot of that effort. By focusing on ethical, permission-based email marketing, you:

• Protect your credibility
• Maintain trust with your audience
• Show that your brand values meaningful connections

Say no to spam

Spam doesn’t help anyone. It frustrates recipients, damages trust, and makes inboxes a less enjoyable place. Instead, focus on responsible email marketing that looks at sending genuine, targeted, and ethical emails your audience wants to receive.

The better approach is to create campaigns that show your customers you value them. When you build trust, tailor content to their needs, and communicate thoughtfully, you’ll see stronger engagement, better results, and a more positive brand reputation.

FAQs about spam

Q: How does spam affect email deliverability?

Spam triggers email filters in a few key ways. For instance, providers look at your:

• Sending IP
• Domain reputation
• Engagement metrics

Things like low open rates or high complaint rates can push emails into spam folders. Sending responsibly helps ensure your legitimate campaigns reach the inbox and perform as intended.

Q: Can subject lines affect whether my email lands in the inbox or spam folder?

Not necessarily. In most cases one word alone won’t make your email go to the junk folder. Major mailbox providers now rely more on sender reputation, domain/IP reputation, and how recipients engage with your emails. However, that doesn’t mean subject lines don’t matter at all.

Q: What are the hidden costs of sending spam?

Spam doesn’t just have a low ROI. It can also cost your business in less obvious ways, like platform fees, wasted team hours, and missed opportunities. Over time, these hidden costs add up and outweigh any small gains. Targeted, permission-based campaigns are a smarter investment for your time and budget.

Q: What are some best practices for ethical email marketing?

Follow these steps to stay ethical and effective:

• Always get explicit permission before sending emails
• Segment your audience so messages are relevant
• Use re-engagement campaigns for inactive subscribers instead of blasting everyone
• Give people a clear and easy way to unsubscribe

Doing this helps you avoid complaints, improve engagement, and build a stronger, more trustworthy brand.

Mailbox providers like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook have changed the rules on how they handle marketing emails. Just look at the recent updates to the Gmail Promotions tab. If you haven’t changed with them, you might find your best marketing emails sitting in the junk folder while your competitors get the sales.

Here is the lowdown on why making an impact in the inbox feels tougher this year, and exactly what you need to do about it.

Stuff that used to work might not work now

Back in the day, you could send a ton of emails during BFCM week, cross your fingers, and hope for the best. As long as you weren’t being obviously spammy and you ‘sort of’ segmented your list, you’d generally get through.

But times have changed. If you try to blast the same big lists without warming things up or checking your engagement, there is a good chance your emails will get blocked. Mailbox providers are protective of their users, and they have new ways to keep the noise out. 

Why are inbox filters behaving differently this year?

First things first, remember: it’s not just you. Mailbox filters have gotten smarter, and the rules are stricter. Here’s an overview of what’s really happening behind the scenes: 

• AI is reading your mail. Filters aren’t just looking for “bad” keywords anymore. They are using AI to read content and look at user behavior to decide if an email is worth showing
• Filters aren’t the same for everyone anymore. The same email can land in the main inbox for one person and totally vanish for another, all based on that person’s habits
• Starting in November 2025, Gmail has ramped up its enforcement on non-compliant traffic. If your messages don’t meet sender requirements, you’re looking at temporary or even permanent rejections
• Gmail just added more tools to help people mass-unsubscribe or block marketing emails. It puts the power in users’ hands now
• Mailbox providers are investing heavily to make inboxes cleaner. They want quieter inboxes, packed with relevant stuff, not clutter.  Unfortunately, this sometimes means regular marketing emails get caught in the crossfire if engagement is low

What hasn’t changed (and what still works)

The fundamentals of good email marketing still work. In fact, they work better than ever because fewer people are doing them right. To land with impact this BF/CM and throughout 2026, make sure you have the following in place: 

1. Clear customer consent

Make sure every person on your marketing list has explicitly consented to receiving your marketing. This makes sure your list is full of contacts ready to engage.

2. Keep your marketing lists clean

Regularly clean up your marketing lists by removing closed or unresponsive accounts. If someone hasn’t opened or clicked an email in a long time, they’re hurting your sender reputation. Send out regular re-engagement messages to prompt preference updates and remove unengaged contacts before BFCM. 

3. Build trust with rock-solid email authentication

Get your technical house in order so providers can trust you are who you claim to be. Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) help demonstrate brand legitimacy. Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) tells a receiving email server what to do after checking SPF and DKIM: whether to reject or accept the incoming email. 

If these aren’t set up correctly, your high-volume BFCM emails could be quarantined as spam, undelivered, or even lead to brand impersonation. Make sure you have all three in place before hitting send.

4. Send consistently

Maintain a steady, predictable sending pattern in the run-up to BFCM. Suddenly increasing your number of sends will look like suspicious activity, so just keep doing what you’re doing and don’t worry about reducing your sends before the sales period.

5. Think engagement first

Mailbox providers use opens and clicks as signals that people want and like receiving your marketing, so don’t treat them like vanity metrics; they’re all important. Instead, focus your segments on your most active, engaged contacts during this period.

6. Make sure unsubscribing is easy

Having a simple, one-click unsubscribe option included in your email template is essential. The process should be effortless to reduce user frustration and prevent future spam complaints.

What should you do differently this year?

Here are a few of my top tips:

• Don’t send huge volumes out of nowhere — start slow and increase volumes gradually so you don’t look suspicious
• Target smarter, segment your audience properly so you’re sending the right message to the right people, not just taking a batch and blast approach
• Relevance is huge. Do your contacts want and expect your emails? Are they opening and clicking? Better engagement means better inbox placement, and if your emails aren’t super relevant, they get filtered out
• Mix up your channels. Try SMS, push notifications, whatever works for your brand, don’t put all your eggs in one basket
• Change up strategy. If you haven’t changed anything in your sending strategy but your results suck this year… well, that’s why! The filters changed, so you need to change them too
• Track your deliverability, use data and tools to check where you’re landing now (inbox, promotions, spam), and set a baseline in advance. This is key for spotting issues before the BFCM rush

Quick takeaway

The big idea for 2025 is simple: you cannot just repeat previous years’ strategies. Sending smarter, more relevant emails and keeping a constant eye on your deliverability data is critical.

If you get ahead of these changes and adjust your plan now, Black Friday and Cyber Monday can still be your biggest days of the year. You just have to play by the new, stricter rules.

First up, let’s look at the changes to Gmail’s Promotions tab as there’s been a lot of chatter about this online already. The Gmail Promotions tab is a separate inbox category where marketing emails, offers, and deals are automatically filtered so they don’t clutter the primary inbox, and there have been some changes to how this works. Then, we’ll dig into some changes to Google’s Postmaster Tool, which impacts deliverability. Promise, it’s not as scary as it all sounds.

Google’s new Promotions tab and purchase tracking

So, what’s new?

Gmail has updated its Promotions tab to prioritize “Most Relevant” emails based on engagement instead of recency and added nudges to highlight timely deals, plus a new Purchases view consolidating transactional campaigns like order confirmation and shipping emails.

This change is part of a trend that isn’t going away; mailbox providers (MBPs) are investing resource into making inboxes as useful as possible for recipients. Just the same as marketers are using AI, MBPs like Gmail are also leveraging AI and machine learning (ML) to better understand not just the content, but the context of an email.

Honestly, they’re trying to do what a lot of marketers keep failing to do: put the right content in front of the right recipient at the right time. I still see marketers doing “email blasts” to their entire lists on the regular, without any nuance. How else can providers like Gmail cut through all that noise in the inbox to make sure that their product is still useful to their users?

What does this mean for email marketers?

Firstly, don’t panic. Just like with the promotions tab, not all users are going to like this new view. There has been so much backlash in social media when things stopped being ordered chronologically – everyone hated it when Facebook did it, and the Insta feed became pretty much unusable.

Email has been around for significantly longer, and we’re all so accustomed to things appearing in date order that this is a much more noticeable and jarring change. Plenty of Gmail users are frustrated with the change and have altered their settings to not use the “most relevant” ordering.

Secondly, fighting against this is going to be a losing battle, and a waste of resource – just like when the promo tab first became a thing and everyone wanted back into the focused inbox. Instead, senders need to focus on what they do have control over. If you use sophisticated automations to send timely, relevant content to your subscribers, then mailbox providers are more likely to prioritize your emails anyway.

Gmail’s updates to deliverability and Google Postmaster Tools

What’s new with deliverability?

Google Postmaster Tools – the unsung hero of email deliverability, quietly working behind the scenes to help your emails land where they’re supposed to: the inbox. If you’re already a fan (hi, fellow nerds!), I’ve got news for you. If you’ve never heard of it, well, buckle up, because Postmaster v2 is strutting into the spotlight, and you’re gonna want to pay attention.

Let’s set the stage: unlike other mailbox providers like Yahoo or Microsoft, our Gmail overlords decided eons ago that sending individual spam reports from their users would be a meh move when it came to protecting privacy. Instead, they created Postmaster Tools, which aggregate complaint rates and tie them to your sending activity. This lets email marketers monitor their campaigns for any slip-ups without Google spilling all the beans on recipients or senders. It’s data, but not creepy data, you know? A win-win for all.

But, alas, we’ve reached the end of an era – Google’s OG Postmaster Tools were retired September 30, 2025.

Don’t panic! Google’s been prepping for this moment with v2 of Postmaster Tools – new, improved, and here to save the day. It’s got fancy new features, better reporting, AND they’ve been steadily buffing it up for over a year to make it one of the sharpest tools in the deliverability kit. Let’s talk about what’s different, why it’s exciting, and how you can make the switch without breaking a sweat.

How to access Postmaster v2 (this isn’t hard – I promise)

Already rocking v1? Great news – you don’t need to redo any verification magical rituals. Just swap that dusty old bookmark for this shiny v2 link: Postmaster Tools v2, and boom, you’re in.

First-timers? No sweat, here’s the rundown:

1. Log in with your Google Account
2. Add your domain
3. Verify ownership by adding a TXT record to your domain’s DNS (sounds scary, but it’s really just a tiny bit of tech wizardry)

For Dotdigital customers, if we’re handling DNS for you, just submit a request through the form on this support article – easy peasy.

What’s new in Postmaster v2 (AKA the glow-up)

Google didn’t just slap on a fresh coat of paint here – they’ve genuinely leveled up. Let’s break it down:

1. The compliance dashboard is queen

Postmaster v2 gives you a new and more detailed compliance dashboard, giving you a clear view of your domain’s compliance with Gmail’s rules. It’s like your email’s report card – are you playing nice with Gmail, or are you in detention?

If you’re using a subdomain (fancy), keep in mind your parent domain also has to be up to snuff for full compliance.

Bonus points: The shiny new spam dashboard helps you understand Gmail’s complaint thresholds. One of the key additions to the compliance dashboard is User-Reported Spam Rate monitoring.

The compliance breakdown covers everything from sender policy framework (SPF)/DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) authentication to User-Reported Spam Rate and alignment with Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) policies.

Keep complaints under 0.1% for an A+, but cross 0.3% regularly, and you’re headed straight to the spam folder. Postmaster v2 makes it easy to see where you stand with clear graphs that scream, “Hey, pay attention to me!”

2. Delivery errors demystified

Ever have emails slowed down or throttled? Been ghosted by Gmail and left wondering why? Yeah, same. Postmaster v2’s delivery error reporting is here to save your sanity. The graph is not just prettier – it’s smarter. Gmail also explains why errors happen and gives you some “here’s how to fix it” nuggets of wisdom.

3. Documentation for humans (finally)

Postmaster v2 isn’t just friendlier – it’s practically your inbox therapist. Google’s added “how-to” links, troubleshooting suggestions, and explanations that actually make sense. No tech degree required! The whole vibe feels collaborative – like Gmail desperately wants your emails to succeed and not just sit in spam purgatory.

The elephant (not) in the room: IP and domain reputation reporting

Let’s address the obvious – Postmaster v2 does not include reputation reporting for domains or IPs. Cue dramatic music.

But honestly? This isn’t super shocking. IP reputation has been fading faster than skinny jeans at a Gen Z convention, and Google’s been championing domain reputation for years. What does this mean for you? Don’t cling to the past. Adapt.

Pro tip: Be holistic with your metrics! Open rates are a solid inbox placement indicator. For Gmail, 30%+ open rates = your emails are living their best inbox lives. Single-digit open rates? Yikes, you’re likely stuck in spam limbo. Dotdigital fans, you can pull Gmail-specific open rates using the Domain Performance Breakdown in each campaign report. Trust me – it’s a game-changer.

What’s next?

The future of deliverability is pretty much the same old song: keep your emails clean, keep your practices sharp, and keep adapting. All major mailbox providers are doubling down on compliance and sending domain reputation, so expect Postmaster v2 updates to align with those trends.

Oh, and while we’re crystal ball-gazing: bet on DMARC enforcement policies (like quarantine or reject) becoming a requirement sooner rather than later. If/when that happens, you can count on v2 to step in with the support you need – you know, like your favorite co-worker who brings coffee when you’re stressed.

Final thoughts

Don’t panic about the Promotions tab updates, these changes are happening for everyone and Google is just trying to improve the user experience. Changes always feel a little jarring, but ultimately, it’s a good thing that email is continuing to evolve and remain as popular as ever.

And whether you’ve been vibing with Postmaster Tools all along or this is the first time you’re adding it to your playbook, v2 is well worth your attention. It’s smarter, sharper, and way more user-friendly. If Gmail is part of your marketing mix (and let’s be honest, it definitely is), investing time into Postmaster Tools pays big dividends for keeping your emails inbox-bound.

So, go on – grab that v2 link and start exploring. The inbox awaits!

Wait – Google and Yahoo implemented stronger sender requirements?

I envy your blissful ignorance. Let me recap our blog post for your convenience. As of February 2024, Gmail and Yahoo required brands sending more than 5k emails per day to their users to comply with 3 requirements:

1. Implement authentication: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC
2. Make unsubscribing easy: include both a list-unsubscribe technical header supporting one-click unsubscribe and an unsubscribe link in the body of all promotional emails
3. Send wanted mail: keep spam complaint rates below 0.3%

Failure to meet these criteria can result in delays in emails being delivered, emails landing in the spam folder, or even emails not being delivered at all, i.e., bouncing.

For Dotdigital customers, we take care of the authentication and list-unsubscribe technical headers for you. Just make sure you’re including an easy-to-find unsubscribe link in the body of your marketing emails and keep an eye on your spam complaint rates using your account reporting and Google Postmaster Tools.

What has Microsoft changed?

Like Google and Yahoo, Microsoft has announced that it requires technical authentication for any domain sending more than 5k emails per day to Outlook recipients. Outlook covers outlook.com, hotmail.com, and live.com domains as well as their regional variations such as hotmail.co.uk. 

The authentication requirements are:

• SPF must pass for the sending domain
• DKIM must pass
• DMARC with at least a p=none policy is required

Microsoft has also clarified its recommended hygiene practices for high volume senders:

• Use a valid from address that can accept replies
• Make unsubscribe easy
• Regularly suppress invalid addresses
• Send to recipients who have provided consent
• Avoid deceptive practices such as misleading subject lines

Clearer guidance for marketers

Deliverability experts have long been evangelizing best practices for achieving inbox placement, and it’s great to see Microsoft echo what we’ve also heard from Gmail and Yahoo. Advice to marketers for strong deliverability has never been more clear, and it’s coming straight from the horse’s mouth:

• Consent: Opt-in is mandatory, and double or confirmed opt-in is recommended as best practice
• Unsubscribe: Make unsubscribing easy and honor unsubscribes quickly
• List hygiene: Regularly remove invalid and inactive contacts from your database
• Purchased data: Buying lists of contacts is prohibited and bad for your reputation and deliverability
• Content: Should be transparent; don’t use misleading headers or subject lines
• Frequency: Honor the expectations set at time of opt-in, and provide ways for your subscribers to change or reduce frequency of mailings

Marketers and mailbox providers unite

Now that Microsoft has aligned its sender requirements with those of Google and Yahoo, the industry is truly speaking with one voice: authentication, consent, transparency, and hygiene are required for successful inbox placement.

Dotdigital customers continue to be ahead of the curve. We handle the technical stuff for you (like domain authentication and list-unsubscribe headers) so you can focus your marketing expertise on sending relevant, wanted emails to engaged contacts.

If you have questions about your deliverability performance or want help in creating a strategy optimized for the inbox, our Dotdigital Deliverability Consultants are here to help. Reach out to your CSM to ask about our deliverability products.

That’s because we know how valuable email is to your business. The 2021 DMA report showed that for every £1 spent on email campaigns, the return on investment (ROI) was an impressive £38. Moreover, in 2022, email marketing yielded a $36 ROI for each $1 spent. But to get this kind of return, you need to make sure your emails are reaching the inbox. And that’s where we, the email experts, come in.

The deliverability team

We’re the Deliverability & Messaging Operations team – Dotdigital’s experts in email & SMS delivery and inbox placement – and we’re here to ensure your messages, you guessed it, get delivered to the inbox. If you’re new to sending email at scale, some of these terms might be new to you. But if you’re here, we’re guessing you’re something of an expert too, and are reading this to get an edge over your competition. 

No matter your familiarity with the subject, deliverability is something you should constantly be considering. So whether deliverability is a new concept to you, something that’s recently become an issue, or something you want to learn more about so that your campaigns and comms are getting the very best return they can, here are the top six things every marketer or communication manager needs to consider.

There are 6 C’s we consider for every customer

1. Consent
2. Content
3. Cadence
4. Contacts
5. Consistency 
6. Change

All of these factors contribute to your sender’s reputation. Reputation in deliverability terms means the priority that mailbox providers give to email traffic. Put more simply, reputation influences whether emails land in the inbox or the spam folder. 

Missing the mark on just one of the 6 C’s leaves marketers or communication managers using self-service platforms wondering what on earth is happening to all the messages they are sending into the ether. Perhaps you have been burnt by one of these 6 C’s in the past. Luckily for you, not only are we going to talk you through the 6 C’s of deliverability, but at Dotdigital, we have in-house experts and services at our fingertips to offer advice on every single one of them.

1. Consent is the cornerstone of deliverability

Obtaining consent has always been important for successful email delivery, even before GDPR was introduced. Which is why we’ve always preached best practices in this area. If customers receive messages that they don’t expect or haven’t consented to, it’s only a matter of time before they hit the spam button or unsubscribe. Consent is also a crucial aspect of data privacy and regulations. Without it, building a successful relationship between your brand and your customers is unlikely. As we’ll go on to discuss, this is crucial, not just for the customer experience but also for deliverability’s sake.

At Dotdigital, we log something called ConsentInsight, which is all that you need to gain and demonstrate evidence of consent. This way, you can be sure to maintain excellent customer relationships, now and in the future.

But consent isn’t just about that initial sign-up – consent doesn’t last forever, and you need to keep an eye on your engagement to ensure that your contacts still want to hear from you. Your provider should have tools and services to help you continuously measure that continued consent, re-activate and re-engage lapsing subscribers, and know when it’s time to say goodbye to a contact who no longer wants your emails.

2. How deliverability is affected by content

Your customers and prospects shouldn’t just be content with your content – you want them to be delighted. And when we say content, we mean everything from the subject line, the friendly from address, the pre-header preview text, the body text, and even the imagery within your emails. 

Filters affect how much folks engage with your brand, but maybe not in the way you’d think. Most filters are a lot smarter than they used to be, and it’s less about whether specific words or content look “spammy” to the receivers and more about how recipients interact with your emails. 

Sometimes recipients don’t expect your emails, don’t recognize your brand, and think your emails look like spam. Your emails are unlikely to be opened, read, or clicked, or worse, they may be marked as spam or junk. 

This is a strong indicator to mailbox providers that your emails are unwanted, so they’re more likely to place them in the spam folder. The more relevant your content is to your targeted audience, the more engagement you’ll get from your emails, and the better reputation you build up.

In a nutshell, content is the key to engagement, and engagement is key to deliverability. Pay attention to every aspect of your campaign content to make sure you’re delighting your contacts.

3. The effect cadence has on your reputation (especially during ramp-up)

Sending frequency can impact your email inbox placement and delivery. It’s not just about the content of your email. For those who are unsure about the difference between delivery and deliverability, delivery refers to whether your email reaches the recipient’s inbox, while deliverability is concerned with its placement in the inbox. In other words, it determines whether your email makes it to the primary inbox or if it’s marked as spam.

How often you send can be a delicate balance. Too much, and your customers may unsubscribe. Too little, and they may forget you and become disengaged. 

Additionally, when new traffic is seen over a domain or IP that is inconsistent, it has the potential to look risky to the receiving mailbox provider. A common mistake is getting the send cadence wrong during the “ramp up” or “warm up” strategy phase when brands are still building the reputation of a new sending address. The problem is that going too fast during ramp-up can damage reputation. Going too slow can cause you to lose it. Your provider should pay special attention during this crucial time to ensure everything goes to plan and continue to advise long after the first big campaign drops. 

4. Your deliverability is only as good as your contact data

The quality of the data you use for your contacts is crucial for both delivery and deliverability. Consider the following questions: 

• Where was the data sourced? 
• Is the information accurate enough to segment and personalize your emails, resulting in better engagement?
• How recent is the data? 
• Are your emails relevant to their situation, role, or interests?

The initial opt-in is a crucial aspect of consent: it’s an opportunity for you to set expectations around frequency and content, ensuring that recipients know what they’re signing up for, meaning they’re less likely to complain later. It’s also a key factor in keeping your contact data clean; using confirmed or double opt-in at the point of sign-up (where recipients need to click a link in an email to confirm they want to hear from you) means non-existent email addresses will be removed from your lists, and the email address signing up belongs to the person who entered it. 

We frequently see issues with bounces, complaints, or spam trap hits negatively affecting sender reputation and inbox placement because the email address that’s been added to the list (either accidentally or intentionally) either doesn’t exist or does not belong to the person or entity who filled out your subscription form. Using confirmed opt-in results in a more engaged source of contacts.

No matter the situation with your data, you or your provider should be asking the right questions and finding a way to move forward to make sure you get the absolute optimum ROI per email.

5. Nothing bolsters deliverability like consistency

Put yourself into the customer’s shoes. When you sign up for an email subscription, you already expect the messages you are going to receive – especially when the sender has followed best practices for consent and laid out the kinds of messages you will be receiving. 

When the consistency of this message varies, be this the content style or subject matter, customer engagement drops off because an expectation has suddenly not been met. Leave bait and switch to the fraudsters, focus on valuable content, and be as consistent and dependable for your customers as you would like to see from your favorite brands. 

6. Monitor and refine your change management practices

Change is inevitable. You need to move with the times and keep up with your customer base and leverage the latest marketing program techniques. The last thing we want to do is dissuade you from changing when all successful businesses change to survive. But as we’ve outlined above, with consistency so integral to deliverability, if you made a change to your marketing program on any of the five other C’s, you could be putting your inbox placement and deliverability at risk. 

Luckily, we’re well-versed in change management. Every day, we help marketers adjust their campaigns and strategy, all whilst reducing the risk changes can pose. This is a vital piece of expertise most businesses can’t live without.

When to bring in the deliverability experts

The best way to think of all the 6 C’s of deliverability is as dominoes that have a long, viral-worthy domino effect. For example: the better your consent practice, the better your contact data, the more relevant content you can deliver, the better your engagement, the better your reputation, the better your deliverability.

Keep in mind that our experts are here to guide you in achieving those impressive engagement rates. Whether you’re launching a new campaign, troubleshooting an issue, or exploring a fresh approach, reach out to us for assistance. Remember, the £38 return on £1 spent is an impressive feat, but neglecting the 6 C’s of deliverability can hinder your full ROI potential. Stay informed and proactive in utilizing these 6 C’s of deliverability to optimize your campaign success.

What is BIMI?

Brand Indicators for Message Identification, or BIMI (pronounced bih-mee), is an email specification that enables email inboxes to display a brand’s logo next to the brand’s authenticated email messages.

BIMI aims to give trusted senders control over how their brand is represented in messaging services. For participating mailbox providers like Yahoo or Gmail, BIMI adopters will have the logo they choose displayed in their recipients’ inboxes.

BIMI serves two important purposes:

• It gives brands control over their visual identity in email clients
• It helps recipients instantly verify legitimate emails from trusted senders

Major email providers including Gmail, Yahoo, and Apple Mail have adopted BIMI, representing a significant shift toward improved email security and brand recognition. Apple’s upcoming adoption is particularly noteworthy, as it signals BIMI’s growing importance in the email ecosystem.

To implement BIMI, email providers require several key elements:

• A brand logo in SVG Portable and Secure format (specific requirements apply)
• DMARC authentication policy set to enforcement level (“quarantine” or “reject”)
• A Verified Mark Certificate (VMC) for certain providers like Gmail and Apple
• Consistent sending reputation and authentication practices

How does BIMI improve my emails?

BIMI is all about improving the overall security of the email ecosystem, and therefore improving the overall customer experience. The regulation around BIMI, and the nature of brands working with MBPs means that this works as another security measure around email sends.

With customers understandably wary of scams, BIMI allows you to add a layer of brand identity and authenticity to your email sends. This means customers have a clear and simple way to identify and trust your communications, giving them more control and peace of mind.

BIMI also allows you to feel more confident, knowing you’ve added another element of protection against anyone trying to impersonate your brand by spoofing.

Another benefit is that inboxes are crowded, and BIMI allows you to showcase your brand identity before subscribers even open your email.

According to research by Red Sift and Entrust, BIMI implementation can lead to:

• 39% increase in email open rates
• 32% higher purchase likelihood
• 120% improvement in brand recall

These impressive statistics demonstrate the transformative power of BIMI for your email marketing strategy.

How can you implement BIMI?

To implement BIMI, you need to follow these key steps:

Set up DMARC authentication

Ensure your domain has a proper DMARC (domain-based message authentication, reporting, and conformance) policy in place. For BIMI to work, your DMARC policy should be set to either “quarantine” or “reject”. If you’re using a subdomain as your custom from address, your top-level organizational domain must also have DMARC implemented with an enforcement policy.

Create and publish your BIMI logo

Design your BIMI logo according to the guidelines provided by the BIMI group. You can use their BIMI SVG conversion tool to help create a compliant logo. Once created, publish the logo at an HTTPS location, either on your own infrastructure or in your Dotdigital account.

Maintain good sender reputation

Mailbox providers will only display your BIMI logo if you maintain a good sending reputation. Stick to deliverability best practices to establish and maintain this reputation.

Test your BIMI logo

After setting up BIMI and ensuring good deliverability practices, create a Yahoo email account and send test emails to it. If your logo appears, it indicates correct authentication and trusted sender status.

Obtain a verified mark certificate (VMC)

For some mailbox providers like Gmail and Apple, a VMC is required. Dotdigital has partnered with Red Sift and Entrust to guide customers through the VMC process. Note that there is a fee involved in obtaining a VMC.

Remember, implementing BIMI not only improves your brand visibility but also supports fraud prevention and email deliverability. If you need assistance with DMARC setup or obtaining a VMC, reach out to your Customer Success Manager or read our help center.

Implement BIMI today

BIMI offers a win-win situation for both you and your email recipients. By implementing BIMI, you can enhance brand recognition, boost email security, and ultimately drive better results for your email marketing campaigns. With the growing adoption of BIMI by major email providers, it’s time to consider this valuable tool and take your email marketing to the next level. 

This blog dives into how DOI can be your secret weapon for boosting email deliverability. We’ll explore how it improves list quality, protects your sender reputation, and safeguards against malicious attacks. By the end, you’ll understand why DOI is a critical step for ensuring your emails reach the inboxes that matter.

Understanding double opt-in (DOI)

Double opt-in, also called confirmed opt-in, is a verification process that involves two steps. Subscribers must confirm their email address and consent to receive communications by responding to a confirmation email. This extra step ensures that the provided email address belongs to the intended individual and is valid, thereby safeguarding both the sender and the recipient.

The benefits of DOI for deliverability

1. Enhanced list quality: DOI is the only way to be 100% certain that a) the email address exists, b) the owner of the email address is the one subscribing, and c) the email address owner definitely wants marketing emails from your brand.
2. Protection against reputation damage: DOI filters out invalid or potentially harmful addresses, protecting against hard bounces and spam traps that could damage sender reputation and impact inbox placement.
3. Defense against malicious attacks: DOI acts as a robust defense against abusive practices, such as bot scripts adding email addresses without consent. Additionally, implementing supplementary security measures like CAPTCHA further fortifies the defense against unauthorized additions to mailing lists, safeguarding both sender reputation and recipient experience.

Risks of neglecting DOI

1. Lower quality addresses: Neglecting DOI may result in more addresses being added to lists but at the cost of lower quality. Without DOI, there’s a higher chance of including disinterested or even fake addresses, diminishing the engagement metrics of your campaigns.
2. Damage to sender reputation: Sending to large lists with low engagement, especially without DOI, can damage sender reputation. This not only reduces inbox placement but also jeopardizes the overall deliverability of your emails.
3. Vulnerability to attacks: Neglecting DOI opens the door to various attacks, including list bombing, whereby malicious actors target email addresses with excessive emails making them unusable. Without DOI, businesses are more susceptible to malicious activities aimed at exploiting loopholes in subscription forms.

The DOI takeaway

Email marketing success depends on many factors, but one of the most crucial is deliverability. To ensure that your emails reach their intended recipients, it’s essential to follow best practices, such as using a double opt-in process. DOI helps to improve the quality of your email list, safeguard your sender reputation, and protect against malicious attacks. Before launching your next email campaign, make sure to implement DOI to increase your chances of success and protect your sender reputation.

We don’t recommend taking risks with your data ahead of the busy period – as recently discussed in our festive spam traps blog post. Expanding your sending volumes and engaging with less active recipients can be a great opportunity for your brand. However, it’s important to approach this strategically and keep a close eye on the results of every campaign you send. This will allow you to make data-driven decisions and ensure that your efforts are effective in re-energizing your audience.

In this blog post, we will delve into email deliverability analytics. We will set some expectations for what you may see over the next few months and discuss the factors that affect email deliverability.

Negative metrics are critical

Email marketers have long relied on opens and clicks as the primary indicators of engagement. However, email has advanced to the point where images are now pre-cached by many email providers such as Gmail, Microsoft, and Apple. 

Additionally, anti-malware filters have become more sophisticated and may click through links to ensure they are safe for recipients, which means that these clicks may not necessarily represent human interaction. As a result, relying solely on traditional open and click metrics is no longer sufficient to accurately measure engagement.

Let’s look at negative metrics. While interest can only be indirectly measured, senders are directly informed by recipients (and mailbox providers) when their expectations are not met.

Unsubscribes vs complaints – useful but not equal

If you are reaching out to your older lists, expect an increase in unsubscribes and complaints (recipients marking your email as junk or spam). You can learn more about your subscriber’s journey by analyzing where these interactions happen. If contact drops out at the beginning of their lifecycle, weak data capture or poor expectation setting are key. If you lose them mid life-cycle, content and frequency play an important role.

A healthy list interaction will show higher unsubscribe than complaints. Unsubscribes do not affect your sender reputation. However, if contacts mark your emails as junk or spam, it will have a heavily negative impact. If you’re seeing more complaints than unsubscribes, then this may be an indicator that your unsubscribe journey needs some attention.

Soft bounces

During the seasonal period, you may notice an increase in soft bounces. A sharp spike is likely to indicate that there’s a problem with the list you are targeting, especially if you haven’t sent it recently. However, a gentle increase overall could be due to the whole email ecosystem being put under strain and a healthy email program will recover.

Soft bounce data can provide insights into how mailbox providers view your emails and what impacts email deliverability. It’s important to note whether the bounces are temporary or persistent and whether they occur on a single domain or multiple domains. Focusing on these details can help optimize your email campaigns and enhance your deliverability rates.

If the volume of soft bounces has affected engagement (opens, clicks, etc.) that indicates the mailbox provider may be junking your mail. Tweak the contacts you are targeting and reduce the frequency at which you reach out to less engaged and unengaged recipients.

Replies

It’s important to remember that email is a two-way communication channel, so you should be checking the replies to your emails. The positive side of replies is that you can see real interaction here; a snapshot into what affects email deliverability. A healthy list will likely receive some questions and comments in amongst the out-of-office replies.

You can use these to see what contacts really think about your emails, and from there work out if you have any weaknesses in other areas such as poor data capture or expectation misalignment at the point of collection.

It’s essential to keep an eye on replies during the festive period, as they’ll be a great indicator if you’re over-sending to your recipients. Failing to check replies could also mean missing questions from your customers about products or purchases, leading to lost sales or bad reviews for poor customer service.

Open rates

An open simply tracks the downloading of a pixel. It’s never been an accurate metric of a real open, because this is not the same as actual human eyes reading your emails.

It’s important to keep track of more than just open rates when it comes to email marketing. Metrics such as click-throughs, replies, and purchases can also be valuable indicators of your campaign’s success. It’s a good idea to monitor these metrics over time to spot trends and identify what’s working and what’s not. By doing so, you can address any potential challenges and optimize your email marketing strategy for maximum effectiveness.

Clicks

Clicks continue to be an important indicator of how engaged recipients are and whether emails have landed in the inbox or not. With the introduction of iOS 17 and Link Tracking Protection, digital marketers have started to question the future of click-based engagement tracking.

Pay attention to trends in clicks over time, especially if re-mailing to non-openers during the festive period. Clicks can be viewed holistically along with open rates, measuring website traffic, and actual purchase data. This versatile insight can indicate whether sending again to contacts who didn’t open the first time is actually worth the revenue, or whether it carries a high risk of damaging your sending reputation and could jeopardize the success of future sends.

As with open rates, B2B senders should now have enough data to know what impact non-human interaction (NHI) has (if any) on their click through rate reporting. If you are suddenly seeing NHI where previously there was none, this is a useful negative metric. Poor reputation is associated with an increase in filters checking links, so it could be an indicator that something is awry with your strategy.

Analyze your deliverability analytics to avoid list fatigue

Recipients can be overwhelmed with email during the holidays, and they may not engage with content as they normally would. By increasing the volume you send, you can decrease the average list engagement – this is list fatigue. 

Mailbox providers are also under heavy load receiving the influx of seasonal emails. An increase in volume coupled with a decrease in engagement is more likely to be interpreted as a sign that your emails don’t belong in the inbox. This can result in a further decline in the success of your emails, even when sending relevant content such as promotions to encourage interaction.

It’s a good idea to analyze the reporting data for your emails, but if you want to take it to the next level, our Deliverability Perspective package provides you with access to more comprehensive inbox placement data, including seeding. This package provides a wealth of information that can help identify potential issues, such as list fatigue, during critical business sending times.

Please get in touch if you’re interested in any of our deliverability products – or if you need any assistance with inbox placement over the festive season.

Businesses have lofty revenue goals to reach and leaning on their email marketing by sending a lot of mail is usually a part of the strategy. This causes recipients to receive more in their inboxes than they receive during other parts of the year, and can exacerbate list churn – and not all list churn is equal.

Your recipients may decide to unsubscribe from your emails over time. It may be because they subscribed to an email five years ago that might not be what they’re interested in now. They may have just signed up to get a welcome reward, they might have found a better offer elsewhere, or they may just be overwhelmed with too many emails. 

Use preference centers

We’re always saying that email marketing is all about recipient consent, and having power over the emails they receive is critical to this. You can leverage your preference center so that recipients can choose: 

• Which mainstreams do they receive – newsletters, sales, transactional only, etc.
• What types or themes of content they’re interested in?
• How frequently do they want to receive emails? (maybe they want a weekly digest or a pause over the holidays) 

Maybe a specific holiday is tough for them – this year or every year – and they’d rather not hear about it. You can use your preference center as a way to show empathy and respect for your contacts and allow them to opt-out.

If someone is no longer interested in your emails, it’s best to offer them a way to opt-out option. This allows recipients to easily remove themselves from your contact list with no negative impact at all. 

Unsubscribing from an email list is a free method of maintaining data hygiene and it helps with list attrition without damaging your reputation. In short, it’s a win-win situation for both parties.

Unsubscribes are great

During the holiday season, it’s normal to see an increase in unsubscribes if you have a healthy holiday email marketing strategy.

As we said before, you won’t be able to keep everyone on your marketing list engaged, especially during the festive period. 

If someone wants to leave they usually have two options: hitting the unsubscribe button or hitting the “this is junk” button – aka complaint. 

If a recipient marks your campaign as junk it will cause mailbox providers to associate risk with the emails you are sending. Complaints are considered a strong sign of emails being unwanted, and they are a heavily negatively weighted metric when it comes to mailbox providers determining your sender reputation. Receiving a lot of complaints is likely to hinder your email marketing success; mail in the junk folder doesn’t help you reach holiday revenue goals.

Simplify your unsubscribe process

It’s important to have an easy opt-out process. Complicated unsubscribe processes are more likely to be abandoned by recipients in favor of hitting the simple “this is spam” button. This is especially acute during the busy festive season when recipients are receiving more mail and have less time (and patience) for managing their inbox. 

Key steps for optimizing your unsubscribe process

You can have a best in class opt-out process by focusing on two steps your recipients will need to navigate: finding where they can remove themselves from your list in the email content, and what the process is after following that path. 

1. Email content

Make it easy to find

• That “this is spam” button is right near the top, so your unsubscribe link needs to be easily identifiable in your email. Don’t hide it in the footer and make it stand out.

Provide instructions 

• “Please contact our support”, “send an email to dpo@example.com” or send us a letter will get you the “junk treatment”. Using a landing page is the best approach.

Clearly show where to click

• If you have a combined unsubscribe and preference center, make sure you still specifically include the word “unsubscribe” in the copy linked in your emails.

Make the process fast

• Two clicks should be all it takes for a user to unsubscribe. The first click is on the unsubscribe link in the email, and the second click should be on a button on the custom page that unsubscribes them from all emails.

2. Unsubscribe landing page

Allow easy recipient opt-out

• On your unsubscribe landing page, the ability to opt-out from all should be clearly visible (ideally at the top of the page) if you’re implementing a combined unsubscribe page and preference center.

Simplify the process 

• Unsubscribe should not require a login. If you require users to log in to manage preferences, you should have a second link in your emails that allows unsubscribe without logging in. Don’t send a double opt-out mail or add unnecessary hurdles.

Reduce email address input errors 

• The email address being unsubscribed should be automatically populated. Asking users to type their email address can lead to typos or the wrong contact being unsubscribed.

Prioritize mobile friendliness 

• With lots of us checking our email on smart phones, always make sure your unsubscribe process is mobile friendly. The greatest landing page won’t do you any good when it’s not really useable with a mobile device

Promptly remove contacts who have unsubscribed 

• We know it’s the holidays and you have a lot of great offers but you should remove a person from your list immediately upon getting the request. You lose the recipient’s trust if you continue sending to them for another two weeks – and they have multiple options to hit that “this is spam” button during this time. 

Summary

Mailbox providers agree with us that unsubscribes are great and that recipients frequently hit “this is junk” when they can’t easily find the unsubscribe link. This is why mailbox providers and senders worked together to implement List-unsubscribe in the technical email headers. 

This allows some mailbox providers and participating mail clients to add an unsubscribe button in their user interface for senders they trust. For users of these inbox services, this button is right at the top and easily visible – but this has not been universally implemented, so marketers still need to pay attention to their unsubscribe process.

The unsubscribe journey could be the last interaction this person has with your brand for some time; it must be a positive experience. Make it quick and easy for recipients to opt-out. Don’t make them jump through hoops and honor the request immediately. 

If they are getting fatigued, or there’s some other temporary reason they are choosing to not receive more emails their reason for leaving could easily be turned into a permanent one. If a recipient is happy with the process, maybe next time they come across your brand in a different channel or need your goods or services they will think of you fondly and be back in touch.

Sending emails to outdated or improperly obtained contact lists can significantly damage your sender reputation, making it harder for your emails to reach the inbox, even for those who are loyal to your brand.

Sending emails in this way can result in severe inbox placement issues or even cause your emails to be blocked, particularly if they are sent to a spam trap. Reputation damage can be long-lasting and may negatively affect your ability to generate revenue from email marketing for weeks or even months.

In this post, we’ll guide you on how to avoid spam traps. We’ll explain what spam traps are, why they can harm your email deliverability, and provide tips to help you maintain a healthy and strong inbox placement during the holiday season.

What is a spam trap?

A spam trap is an email address that would not actively sign up to receive marketing communications. They are part of the toolbox used by anti-abuse networks, security appliances, and mailbox providers to identify emails that would be unwanted or even harmful to recipients – and then to prevent senders of those emails from reaching the inboxes of real people.

There are different types of traps:

• recycled traps – these are email addresses that were once valid but have been abandoned and repurposed as a spam trap
• typo traps – these are entire domains that look similar to popular mailbox provider domains (e.g. gmial.com instead of gmail.com) that are used as traps 
• pristine traps – these are email addresses created to be spam traps and never used by an actual person to send or receive email

Why is sending to a spam trap so bad?

A mailbox provider’s priority is to protect its users from unwanted and malicious emails. Regardless of your intentions, if you’re indicating that you’re a bad actor by sending to spam traps then your sender’s reputation will be negatively affected. 

This means your emails are more likely to land in the junk or spam folder, may take much longer to be delivered, or may be rejected outright and not even delivered to junk.

Negotiating the removal of a block listing and repairing the reputation damage caused is not fast or easy. It can take weeks or sometimes months to fully recover from a bad block listing due to hitting a spam trap. If your business is hit at the beginning of the holiday season, that could mean you’re only just back on your feet again in time for Valentine’s Day.

How to avoid spam traps during the holiday season

Most commonly we see clients hitting traps when they’ve succumbed to pressure to increase their sending volume and send emails to recipients they don’t usually send emails to. This a bad idea for a few reasons:

1. Mailbox providers a) like to see consistency from senders and b) are often on the verge of being overwhelmed given mail volumes at this time of year. 
2. Recipients are also overwhelmed with far too much email and are less likely to engage with and more likely to complain about receiving emails they don’t remember signing up for.
3. A lot of the ways marketers try to quickly increase volume at short notice significantly increase the risk of hitting spam traps.

3 risky strategies to avoid

To ensure your email deliverability stays strong during the holiday season, steer clear of these risky strategies:

1. Sending to lists that haven’t been sent to for over 12 months. Or ever.

Risk: Recycled traps tend to be found in old data, even if it was originally collected using permission marketing best practices. 

If you’ve found a segment missed by your automation or some other permissioned data you haven’t sent to for a while, and you know you’re going to want to send to them over the holidays, our advice is: start now. It’s much better to do this early to give you time to resolve any issues before critical sending days.

Send slowly over days or weeks, include a reminder of why contacts are receiving your emails (in case they’ve forgotten about you) as well as a clear unsubscribe link, suppress any soft bounces and remove anyone who continues to not engage. If you’re a Dotdigital customer and you want help with re-activating lapsed contacts, contact your Customer Success Manager to start a conversation about our re-engagement package.

2. Trying to“reactivate” contacts from the suppression list

Risk: Abandoned email addresses will usually hard bounce for at least 6 months before being repurposed as a recycled trap. A good email service provider (ESP) will automatically suppress contacts that hard bounce, so these traps are likely to lie within your suppression list.

3. Purchasing or renting some more data to send to

Risk: Not only is this against most ESPs T&Cs which means you risk having all your sending suspended when they spot the purchased data, but lists for sale or rent tend to contain a lot of scraped data. Spam traps, especially pristine type traps, are very commonly found in this kind of data – and they tend to be the ones that cause the most serious kinds of block listings that have the widest impact across mailbox providers and take the longest to resolve.

If you are importing data into your Dotdigital account during the holiday period (or any other time of the year) then our Watchdog will be taking a look and flagging anything suspicious. An import that’s got a high-risk score is more likely to contain spam traps. So we’ll block the upload while you take a look at the data sources and remove anything risky that’s made its way into your list.

What if you do hit a trap?

The key here isn’t identifying the specific spam trap you hit and removing it from your list. Spam traps are intentionally a closely guarded secret, and for every trap you find, there could be ten, fifty, or a hundred more in your list. That’s because spam traps indicate underlying problems with your data collection or management.

The first step is to use whatever information is available to try to identify the source of the problematic data. Different trap operators will offer up some information that’s redacted to a greater or lesser extent; some offer a rough estimate of the date and time when the trap was hit, and others will provide the subject line of the email sent that hit the trap.

The next step is to temporarily stop sending to all data that’s come from the high-risk source while you go through step three: segmenting out contacts who you know are engaged. Purchase history, opens, clicks, etc. can all be used holistically to identify recipients who are most likely to be real people who want to hear from you.

Finally, it’s time to plug the hole in your data collection. Depending on the type of trap, it can indicate different areas of vulnerability:

Pristine traps

Make sure your forms are secured with CAPTCHA, double or confirmed opt-in, and remove any third party data from your lists

Typo traps

Ask your web developers to add some basic validation to points of collection to check that the email addresses are valid. It’s pretty easy to add some logic that suggests someone might mean “hotmail.com” instead of “hotmial.cmo” in the email field. Plus double or confirmed opt-in at the point of data collection can help weed these out as well.

Recycled traps

Make sure you have a strategy for sunsetting contacts who never engage with your brand or who haven’t engaged for a very long time. Use knowledge of your sales cycle and typical customer journeys to plot the point at which the risk of keeping an address on your list outweighs the potential that they might convert into a customer. And engage a responsible ESP that suppresses email addresses that bounce.

Summary

It’s so easy to sabotage yourself in November by making some choices that temporarily boost revenue for Singles Day or Black Friday, but then tank your reputation so you’re in the spam folder throughout December and even into January. It’s far less risky in the short term – and more profitable in the long term – to be smart and stick to your sustainable sending and organic growth strategies to avoid jeopardizing inbox placement. 

If you need any help this holiday season with how to avoid spam traps or anything else related to inbox placement, our expert Deliverability team is always around to assist you in making the best choices for your business.