Email Marketing: Avoid Spam Traps
One of the most frustrating notifications a user can receive from their email marketing platform is that their account has been suspended. Why? Because they've been flagged for spamming.
Key Takeaways
Using a responsible a list provider or partner who has sourced their email list in a legitimate and responsible way is a good way to avoid spam traps.
Ethics and responsibility is at the heart of this conversation. Any email list that is sourced ethically and legally will not land you in spam traps.
Whether you are a business owner or a digital marketer, you may have been told to simply “buy a list of emails and blast them.” As easy and tempting as it sounds, it is a very dangerous move. If you’ve been flagged as repeat offender of an entity that fits the profile and actions of a spammer, your domain (@yourdomain.com) could be banned from email marketing forever.
If your account has been shut down, it’s not as easy as jumping onto another platform to send out emails again. Why? Various email marketing platforms like MailChimp, Constant Contact, GetResponse, and ActiveCampaign all work together to stop spammers. Spamming is bad for their business,. The last thing they want is an individual using their platform to spam users. Believe it or not, they compare notes, share some of the same spam traps, and at times, database information.
Protect your domain at all costs by avoiding the two most common spam traps: Honeypots and Age Spam Traps.
Honeypot or Pristine Spam Trap
The first type of spam trap is called the “honeypot”, or a “pristine spam trap.” These are email addresses that anti-spam companies will put out into the wild. They will impersonate what is considered a valuable target or profile and put that email address out somewhere on the web. Maybe they'll go fill out a form with it or they'll put some sort of post in a blog with that fake person's email address. That way when marketers or data brokers are scraping websites, they end up picking up that email address.
The logic behind it is that only possible way then that you acquired that email address is that you scraped it. They use this method as a very good indicator to say that this marketer or broker acquired this list through nefarious means.
Age Spam Trap
The second type of spam trap we're going to talk about is an: age spam trap. Age spam traps are a lot different than honeypots. All of the different email providers out there like,Yahoo, Gmail, or Hotmail have some sort of policy in place when people stop using their email. For example, if you stop using Gmail, you have 180 days to before they implement an Age Spam Trap. If you don't open your Gmail after 180 days, they're going to send you an email. If you don't respond to the email in 30 days, they will deactivate your account, Sometimes they reactivate the account for themselves to check on people who potentially are sending to email addresses that have gone dark.
So, if you're not doing proper list hygiene, meaning you don’t scrub your email list for inactive accounts, yet you keep sending to it, you're gonna get caught in this kind of age spam trap. And when they reactivate it, then they will report back all the people who send to that email address during the time— when that now, age spam trap, is active.
Blacklist or Blocklist
The results of all this are potentially landing on a blacklist or blocklist. the blacklist is a temporary list that you're on, that says that you're not following basically emailing best practices, if you don't change your sending behavior. If you don't change your list hygiene behavior, you're going to be there again, and you're gonna be there again. And it will impact your deliverability for the length of time that you're on the blacklist.
Beyond that is a blocklist. Ending up on a blocklist is more of a permanent thing. This happens when either you hit too many of these pristine spam traps or if you don't change your behavior. If you're getting a whole bunch of complaints, and you do nothing to change how you've been behaving, you will eventually end up on the blocklist and you become a known spammer. And then your deliverability is going to go down significantly.
Ethics and Responsibility
Ultimately, the first step to ensure your business or your domain does not end up in a spam trap, is to use a responsible and reputable list provider or partner who has sourced their email list in a legitimate and responsible way.
Ethics and responsibility is at the heart of this conversation. Any email list that is sourced ethically and legally will not land you in spam traps. The goal of any responsible marketer is to acquire email addresses and lists through legitimate ways from campaigns and offers, with landing pages and forms that the user understands and agrees to the terms of what happens once they submit their information. By practicing this, you ensure a minimum of a 97% deliverability rate.
TIP: It is a good practice to use a service, like NeverBounce or KickBox to scrub your email addresses before you load it into the email marketing platform.