Why emails end up in spam and how to deal with it - a complete guide. How to send a newsletter and not get into spam lists How not to get into spam lists

30.10.2023 -

Every year, the more spam there is, the more it irritates users and the more stringent the mail filters work. According to Mail.ru statistics, only 5% of senders have not yet encountered the problem of being blacklisted. Even if you send newsletters to your clients and have received consent to subscribe, there is no guarantee that your correspondence will reach the recipient. And when the database is purchased or you try your hand at email marketing for the first time, get ready for the fact that your IP or domain, and not just your email address, may fall under the filter. It is unrealistic to completely eliminate the risk of being classified as spam during mass mailings, but you can minimize the risks.

Protect your IP reputation

Each IP address has its own rating - if it is low, then there is a high probability that the letters will be regarded as spam. Check the reputation of your IP in the “Presence of IP in spam databases” section of the website http://2ip.ru/. For different types of letters (personal business, mass for clients, mass “cold”), use different IPs so as not to lose contact with all recipients one day. It is best to broadcast from a permanent IP, which must have valid reverse DNS records pointing to your domain. And remember that the mailer considers the new IP address an increased threat, since there is no rating for it, and checks letters especially carefully. In email marketing, there is even the concept of “warming up the IP,” that is, getting mail services accustomed to new addresses through a gradually increasing flow of mailings.

Use a trusted domain

If you plan to send out mass messages from a free mailbox created in systems like Mail, Yandex, Gmail, you are writing yourself a ticket to the blacklist. Of course, in the absence of your own domain, there is a great temptation to use the same Mail.ru, which allows you to bombard recipients at a speed of 1 letter per minute or 3,600 per day. However, it would be more reliable to create your own domain, which contains the name of your company or product, which also increases the level of trust. Mass mailing services Smartresponder and Unisender also advise not to indicate free addresses in the From field. Sign your domain with special DKIM keys (Gmail allows keys no longer than 1024 bits) and SPF, publish a DMARC policy. If you cannot do this yourself, contact your hosting technical support. In addition, the websites of popular hosters and email services have instructions for such settings.

Subscribe with your real name

It's no secret that a letter sent from a real person will please the user more than spam from another robot. So, forget about the phrase “no-reply”. Your recipients should have the opportunity to respond to the email. They certainly won’t add a no-reply to your address book, but they will click the “spam” button with pleasure and a sense of accomplishment. By the way, some European countries legally oblige the sender to indicate an address available for feedback. If you still use a stub address, then call it anything other than no-reply. In the From field, for greater persuasiveness, write the real first and last name of the employee or at least the name of the company.

Allow instant unsubscribe

The link to the unsubscribe page should not be hidden in small font or grayed out. Gmail helps users automatically unsubscribe from receiving emails, so it recommends including an email address or an instant unsubscribe link in the List-Unsubscribe header. If mail keeps coming back from some recipients, unsubscribe them yourself. Also periodically send recipients requests to confirm their subscription. Email services usually set an unsubscribe link automatically. Simplify the unsubscribe process to 1-2 clicks so that the user does not have to enter a password or fill out a form. Please note that Yandex.Mail promises to soon help users unsubscribe from mailings, even if the sender has not provided this option.

Format correctly

All emails must be formatted according to RFC 5322 and HTML (if used) standards. Verify that the Message-ID header field contains a valid value. To honestly indicate bulk mailing, you must use the Precedence: bulk header field. Do not copy text from MS Word directly into your email, otherwise it will not display correctly in HTML format. This is especially true for ellipsis and quotation marks. Do not use too bright (in particular red and green) colors and backgrounds, as well as large illustrations with a minimum of text - this irritates not only users, but also spam filters.

Remove safe words

The headline should not contain a typical call to action: it will still be lost in the total mass of banal triggers that will be sent to your recipient’s email on the same day. No “Click/Click/Buy/Download”, mentions of money or enrichment options (“Vanya earned 100,000 rubles in a month,” or “Do you want to receive $1,000 a day?”), promises of freebies (“Download for free!”, “Gift !”, “We’ll give you a present if you open the letter!”), as well as discounts, urgency, exclamation marks and capital letters. If you want to check the performance of a service or script, do not even send internal mailings with the words “Test”, “Test”, “Check” in the subject line of the letter. There is no need to rely on emotions and try to evoke pity or surprise with headlines: “We were worried about you...”, “Is everything okay with you?” - if the filters have not yet been trained for this type of email, then you will not be able to trick users. Write in the subject line of the letter about what exactly you want from the addressee and what he will receive when reading the letter - he will learn news about the replenishment of the assortment, will be able to participate in a promotion, competition, etc. Anything can be written about without using safe words.

Collect delivery statistics

Regularly count the percentage of emails delivered, ending up in the spam folder or deleted as spam, the percentage of non-existent addresses in mailings (filters also complain about their presence), as well as the percentage of complaints about mailings per month. To collect statistics, use mailing services that support the FBL standard, which generates a report when the “Spam” button is clicked, for example Smartresponder, Unisender, Expertsender. You can also get information about the behavior of your subscribers on the services https://postmaster.mail.ru, https://postoffice.yandex.ru, the latter shows deliverability even without DKIM and SPF.

If you, as expected, ask users about their consent to mailing lists - when registering on the site or after sending the first letter - collect confirmations, that is, scans of letters or questionnaires. If your domain or email address is included in the spammer database and your account is blocked, this will be proof that you are right. If you want to play it safe, check your email for spam using the free services http://www.emailspamtest.com/ and http://putsmail.com/.

Most courses on making money online are related to selling affiliate programs. For the seller, this is just a link that you need to “stick” anywhere and expect that they will click on it and buy the course offered by the partner. There are different ways to distribute such links: on social networks, on forums and third-party sites, on your blog, through paid advertising, and also through email newsletters. For example, Sergey Kamardin offers such work with affiliates. You can. We will focus on the last one - email marketing and tell you how to send mailings so that the letters do not end up in spam.

How simple everything seems at first glance: compose a letter, insert an affiliate link, set up automatic mailing and wait for the money to flow into your wallet. Well, it's not that simple! You're expecting sales, but suddenly you discover that none of your emails have reached their target. The letters ended up in spam, and your account was banned for intrusive mailing.

We don't know exactly how anti-spam filters work, but there are some obvious tricks that will help prevent emails from ending up in spam.

What should I do to prevent emails from going to spam?

We've put together a list of things you need to do to ensure your emails reach your target audience.

1. Connect monitoring services for your mailings in all popular mail services: postoffice.yandex.ru, postmaster.mail.ru, postmaster.google.com, postmaster.aol.com, help.yahoo.com/kb/postmaster. They help track the movement of your emails throughout the day and their deliverability. If a problem arises, you will be able to find out about it in time, see which letters ended up in spam, what was in them, when and to whom they were sent.

2. Your letters must contain: DKIM record(confirms that the letter came from exactly the sender written in the address), DMARC record(checks authentication and sends reports), SPF entry(protects your domain from counterfeiting). Thanks to them, both the recipient and the robot will be sure that your account has not been hacked or forged, and that it was you who sent this letter. This builds trust and increases not only the percentage of inboxes, but also the open rate of emails.

3. Every letter should contain information why the person received this letter: because he subscribed to your blog, for example. Usually this is a not very noticeable note at the bottom, in the footer, in the format: “You received this letter because you subscribed to our mailing list - and a link to the site.”

4.Unsubscribe link must be mandatory, and it must be clearly visible and not hidden by anything. If it is not there or the person cannot find it immediately, then he will click on the “Spam” button. This will greatly damage your reputation, and if there are a lot of such complaints, then all your letters will end up in spam. It’s better to write below that “you can always unsubscribe using such and such a link, but then you will miss a lot of interesting things.” If a person does not want to receive newsletters from you, then he is not your target audience and there is nothing to keep him.

How the spam filter works

5. It would be a good idea to add it to every letter. information about the subscriber himself: date of subscription, IP address from which this subscription was made. To prove to the person that he really signed up, even if he completely forgot about you. This can be easily done on the mailing services you use.

6. Check that your IP and IP service are not in the spam database. You can do this here: 2ip.ru/spam/

8. In letters there should be no “spam words”. To prevent your emails from being classified as spam, these words cannot be used either in the body or in the subject line of the email. These are the most popular words in sales, such as: sale, earnings, free, buy, 100%, etc. To find out whether your letter contains such “stop words”, you can check the letter using a free service, for example, emailcheck.ru or spamtester.bazaaremail.com

1. We warn about sales in advance

You know, how this happens most often - we invite people to leave their email in exchange for some free pdf book or video course, and from that moment they become our subscribers.

At the same time, we act completely within the law - each new subscriber must confirm his subscription using a special confirmation link that he receives in a service letter. That is, we do not buy databases somewhere “on the side”, and then send out millions of offers to buy our products to everyone.

But none of this helps. The fact is that people leave their email so that you can send them a specific free product for download. They do not agree that after this you will inundate them with offers to buy some products (which sometimes even have nothing to do with the freebies for which people initially signed up).

Technically, you are not spamming. But in reality, you’re really doing it. And postal workers, of course, see this. Therefore, one of the ways to reduce the number of complaints about your letters to mailers is to immediately indicate on the subscription pages that by leaving your email, a person agrees to receive advertising and sales materials from the author of the newsletter.

But I will say from my own experience that this is a very weak method. It was “introduced into use” by one famous American guru, who teaches management and sales through email newsletters. This is exactly what he does, and it brings him excellent results.

But here you need to understand the difference - people subscribe to his mailing list just to learn how to sell through emails. And of course, they are happy to check the “send me promotional materials” box. If you do not work in the niche of selling newsletters, then this method may not work for you.

For example, the mailing list of one of the largest information businesses in Russia has been falling to me exclusively in “SPAM” for almost a year now. Despite the fact that six months ago they put that treasured “I agree to receive advertising materials” checkbox on all their subscription pages. It didn't help, sir.

2. Use domain email

This “technique” is absolutely mandatory for use. If you put some free gmail or yandex in the sender's address, then this is almost a 100% way to end up in “spam”.

Don't skimp on buying a normal domain. You don’t even have to put a website on this domain - you can use the domain without a website to send mail from it.

Get yourself an email like " [email protected]" or at least " [email protected]“—and the deliverability of your emails will become much higher.

It's funny to say, but I once thought that everything was quite the opposite. They say that if email programs see domain mail in the sender's address, they treat it with suspicion. And if you use a regular “human” address, then they will perceive the letters as messages from an “acquaintance”.

But the statistics on email deliverability and open rates clearly showed how wrong I was. With my usual 20-30 percent open rate, the emails I sent by subscribing to gmail were opened by only 1.3% of recipients.

3. We beg people to unsubscribe.

You may have seen this in the newsletters you receive daily in your inbox. Some authors almost tearfully beg you to unsubscribe from their mailing list in every letter. Each of their emails begins and ends with a call to “click the unsubscribe button at the bottom of the letter.”

It would seem, why remind people of this opportunity once again? After all, with such a “call to action”, many more subscribers, obtained with sweat and blood, will probably unsubscribe.

And this actually makes sense. The fact is that most people are “unscrupulous.” They can click “unsubscribe”, or they can click “spam” (that is, send a complaint against you to the mail server). In this case, the fact of unsubscription is not considered a complaint.

Therefore, the authors of mailing lists deliberately burn out their subscription list from those who will never buy anything anyway, but can do a fair amount of harm. Thus, the call to “click on unsubscribe” is a completely effective way to increase the deliverability and open rates of your emails.

4. We write content emails

In my opinion, this is the most powerful way to make friends with mailers and settle in the inbox of your readers.

You've probably noticed that most emails in newsletters provide little value to readers. The authors use letters only as “link carriers.” That is, the overwhelming majority of emails look something like this: “Hello everyone! I have great news - here is the link." Or - “Hello everyone! We have a new product - here is the link."

That is, there is absolutely nothing to read in the letters themselves. Email writers do this because they believe that the longer the email, the fewer people will get to the link at the end and click on it. It must be said that they think so quite rightly. However, it is not quantity that decides here, but quality.

It’s better that you get ten clicks on a link in an email, but each of these clicks will be thoughtful and “warmed up” than a hundred clicks that ultimately lead to nothing, right?

Therefore, write interesting letters with a focus on entertaining readers. By the way, if you think that you need to send people very useful emails filled with valuable content, then you are mistaken. Over-training is just as harmful as over-selling. Subscribers should be primarily interested in reading your emails. Then they themselves will move them to the “inbox” from the “spam” folder, even if they accidentally fly there.

5. Don't use THESE spam words

Let me say right away that I am very skeptical about the various lists of spam words that the almighty mailers use to decide where to send your email - to “hell” or to “heaven”.

Such well-known spam words as “earnings”, “vacancy”, “potency”, “Viagra”, “sex”, “database”, “dating”, of course, it is better not to use unnecessarily. But email robots have become much smarter lately, and they simply no longer focus on the words in the headline.

If people really want to receive your emails, then you can write almost anything in the headers. And if not, you won’t be able to bypass spam filters without them.

But let me give you a small list of the most common spam words in headlines, to which spam filters react like a bull to a red rag:

Commercial: Buy, Order, Additional income, Earn, While you sleep, Money, Without investment, Free, Database
Medicine: Viagra, Baldness, Potency, Excess weight
Winnings: Lottery, You won, Raffle, You were chosen, Your email won
Acquaintance: Dating, Girls online, I want to meet you, Sex, Dating profile
Other: Casino, Rolex, Hello, Read, 100%

6. Email formatting

The issue of correct formatting of emails for mailing raises a lot of controversy. Expensive email agencies insist on a unique visual layout, with pictures and design, like a real web page.

Other experts argue that the letter should be formatted as simply as possible - that is, practically nothing at all (as if it were a regular email from your friend). Personally, I am of the latter opinion.

If you use Google mail, then you probably know that in addition to the “SPAM” folder, there is a division of incoming letters into “regular” and “advertising”. Colorful email design is a direct path to the “advertising” folder. And people look there no more often than they look at SPAM.

In addition, very often email programs do not load images in order to reduce the amount of traffic and protect the user. That is, your colorful email may arrive in the form of a bunch of “broken” pictures. It looks very ugly and incomprehensible (usually the title and some introductory content are written directly on this picture).

Therefore, I vote with both hands for the regular text format. Moreover, you should try to ensure that even text formatting is kept to a minimum. That is, there is no need to overuse bold, italics, underlining, highlighting text with color or shading.

Don't be afraid that your readers will miss some important part of the message. They will definitely miss it, even with all your yellow, sorry, discharge. That’s why we send not one, but several emails, where we explain the same thing several times, in different words.

But plain text is less annoying to mailers. Also, don't use sentences where ALL THE LETTERS ARE CAPITAL, or EVERY NEW WORD BEGINS WITH A CAPITAL LETTER, or EVERY SECOND LETTER IS CAPITAL LETTER. All this will be noticed, and you will end up in “spam”.

And, of course, fewer links. Ideally, you should have just one link per long content email. Otherwise, you know how it happens - the letter has three lines and seven links (“so that they definitely click”).

7. Insure yourself against “neighbor bitches”

Let's now talk a little about the technical side of email deliverability. In general, there are quite a lot of specialists who focus specifically on the technical side of the issue: the correct configuration of some kind of proxies, sending ports, etc. By the way, this doesn’t really help anyone, since letters from these specialists are always in my “spam”.

But we will still discuss one technical nuance. Returning to domain mail from point No. 2, I would advise you to choose not regular hosting for your domain, but the so-called VPS/VDS. The difference there is very simple - regular hosting on one IP address can host up to 500 different domains (both yours and others). And VPS gives you an individual dedicated IP address.

On regular hosting, your IP shares reputation with your neighbors. That is, if one of them begins to behave badly, send blatant spam, publish prohibited materials, etc., then all this will affect you. That is, your emails will end up in spam because your IP neighbor has a bad reputation.

Therefore, it is better not to take risks and move to a normal VPS. Moreover, their prices are now not much higher than those of conventional hosting.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I would like to say that these emal mailing techniques will not protect you 100% from being classified as spam. All the same, some of your letters will end up in “SPAM” and “Junk”, simply because it is a mass mailing. There's nothing you can do about it. But these methods will definitely help you improve your deliverability.

Don't forget to download my book. There I show you the fastest way from zero to the first million on the Internet (a summary from personal experience over 10 years =)

Anton Vyborny

Especially for beginners, I have written a detailed guide in which I will tell you how to avoid getting into spam and increase the deliverability of your emails.

We will look at a lot of tricks, ranging from the simplest to complex tricks for professionals.

First of all, I want to remind you of the main principle of any good newsletter - a high-quality base. You should only send emails to people who have provided you with contact information. This is the most basic principle. Without this, there is no point in reading the article further.

Email on domain name

To send bulk emails, you need to use a “branded email” with your domain. For example, our mail , but not . If you send emails to more than 50 contacts at a time, then you can forget about free mailboxes. Let's think: spam filters are developed by smart logic programmers at Google, Yandex, and Mail.ru. How they see the newsletter from free mail:

No email with your own domain means no website
If there is no website, then there is no company
If there is no company, then how does an ordinary person have a database of 100 contacts?
Why does an ordinary person send one letter to hundreds of people?

Thus, we see that from a developer’s point of view, blocking mass mailing from regular mail is logical.

Mailing only through special services

Bulk mailings must be sent through special mailing services. They have their own servers that can send a large number of emails. If a mailing service monitors the reputation of its server's IP address, then you are less likely to end up in spam.

As a rule, paid services have a better reputation than those with a free plan for 2000 subscribers. Free packages are used by beginners and spammers who do not know how to properly work with a subscriber base. It turns out that if there are a lot of spammers on a mailing service, this indirectly affects the deliverability of your letters.

Many entrepreneurs start doing mass mailings directly from the mail window. Add all available addresses to the “To” line and send out the mailing. They naively believe that their letters will arrive, but this is not the case. If you send a mailing to more than 50 people, you need to use the services of a professional mailing service. I wrote about this methodology in the article “12 stages of email marketing.”

Mailing only to your database

Almost any entrepreneur or email marketer begins his journey with mailings to someone else’s database. They think that spamming works the same way as cold calling. But this is not true at all. When you make cold calls, your phone cannot be blocked by the teleoperator. Yes, you can be sent to three letters, but after that you can simply call another client.

Not so with email newsletters. Let's say you send a mailing to 1000 addresses, 200 people open this mailing and 100 of them click on “Spam”. The email provider understands that this is spam mailing and puts a block on your email and domain name. All your bulk emails will end up in spam and you won't even know it. Based on previous mailing results, email providers determine the rating of your domain name and decide whether to deliver your emails in the future or not.

Use Double opt-in

All subscribers in your database must have . Surely you noticed when registering on various sites that you are often asked to confirm this very registration by clicking on a link in the letter that you received by mail. It takes some time, but this technology allows you to legally send out mass mailings. Before putting your letter in “Spam” or “Inbox”, the mail provider automatically checks for the presence of double opt in. Therefore, all subscribers in the database must double confirm the registration of their email address.

Advantages of double opt-in

Let's summarize the list of basic things that should be by default. Following these rules will give you a guarantee of 80% deliverability to your inbox.

You must have a “branded email”
You must send mailings from a special mailing service and preferably a paid one
Mailings should only be sent to your subscriber base.
Double confirm

Safe words

Email providers monitor the content of your emails and look for safe words that spammers are most likely to use. Think for yourself, if you hear these words, you will most likely decide that something is being “sold” to you. There are a lot of such words, and you yourself know them:

Promotion
For free
Download
Inexpensive
Free access
Free installation
100%
Million
Thousand(s)
A bunch of
Chance
Dear (for example, friend);
Friend
Miracle
Success
Free trial access
Free site
Free consultation
No investment

Don't use too much capslock

Many marketers abuse caps loсk and write headlines in capital letters to PAY YOUR ATTENTION. You can't do that. Also, don't use a lot of exclamation marks.

This especially cannot be done in headlines.

A bad example of a headline: “ATTENTION!!! Our store has a SUPER PROMOTION!!!”

Use proper letter structure

Create beautiful and clear letters. In the previous article I explained how . If you have a visual product, then it is very important to create beautiful design templates. The conversion will be much better. And vice versa: if you sell services that are difficult to present visually, then make letters without design. The recipient should think that you are personally writing specifically to him, and not just sending the same letter to everyone.

Give me the opportunity to unsubscribe

All adequate mailing services have a link to unsubscribe in the letter. It should be visible and users should be able to unsubscribe in one click. Don’t force them to log into your website’s personal account, search for something, and configure something. You can’t do this, because people will simply click on “Spam”, and the reputation of your domain in the eyes of mailers will greatly decline. Give them the opportunity to unsubscribe from your mailing list.

What should the “Unsubscribe” button look like in your newsletter?

How it shouldn't be

Send a maximum of 1 email per day

It is necessary to understand your target audience and not send emails too often. If you have useful, non-selling content, then you can send a maximum of 1 email per day. Don't forget that what seems useful to you is not always useful to your subscribers.

If you have a blog or online store, you can send out newsletters 1-2 times a week.

It all depends on the specifics of the business. One of our clients sells outsourcing services in the USA and, after corresponding with the lead, sends letters every 3 months with a reminder about themselves. Every business has different email sending intervals.

Trigger emails

The concept of mass mailings in the CIS countries works, but not as effectively as 10 years ago. In the US, most companies use marketing automation and . The concept of this technology is that emails are sent only in connection with some specific action on the site. For example, when a person re-enters the site or visits the same page 5 times. There are plenty of options. The open rate for such emails reaches 75%.

Previously, all marketers sent out emails manually every day. There was no automation in mailing services and businesses simply bombarded them with letters. Today, you should try to send a mass mailing once a week to your entire database, and on other days, subscribers should receive trigger emails with individual content. Previously I wrote about subscription base. Thanks to this technology, you can create personalized communication scenarios with your clients.

Learn more about the power of advanced segmentation with a free

Cleaning the subscriber base

This is a very difficult step, but subscribers who don't read your newsletter need to be removed. If a user does not read your newsletter for more than 7 months, then you can delete him. Believe me, you will earn more money. How?

Everything is very simple. When you send out a newsletter, your email provider analyzes the open rate and click-through rate of your emails. Imagine you sent 1000 emails and got 400 opens. This open rate is a sign of a healthy base. And imagine that for the same 1000 emails you received 30 opens. This is a sign that subscribers are not interested in your offer.

Once you clear your database, you will immediately increase your open rate, which increases your chances of getting into your inbox.

Emails are the cheapest tool for mass communication with potential clients. It is actively used, including by unscrupulous companies that distribute spam. Our task is to create a legal mailing system based on a high-quality database and use it without the risk of losing your reputation.

Vitaly Trakhtenberg,

owner, Trakhtenberg Consulting Agency, Belarus

In this article you will learn

How to avoid getting into spam and organize email newsletters correctly

How to Attract Customers and Increase Sales with Email

If you have decided to use online newsletters as an advertising tool and want to know: how to avoid getting spam and attract the maximum number of customers, then first of all determine the target audience.

1. Organization of mailings using other people's addresses

Best article of the month

We interviewed businessmen and found out what modern tactics help increase the average bill and the frequency of purchases by regular customers. We published tips and practical cases in the article.

Also in the article you will find three tools to determine customer needs and increase the average bill. With these methods, employees always fulfill the upsell plan.

There are companies whose business is based on collecting addresses from all sites that a robot can reach. Robots are capable of processing a huge amount of information in the shortest possible time. There are international online conferences, MSN addresses, mailing lists, chats, and in general all resources where visitors leave information about themselves.

There are also unscrupulous companies that sell their clients' addresses to spammers.

But I categorically do not recommend using such databases. They contain many outdated or deleted addresses, as well as spam-traps 1 . In the latter case, the likelihood that the domain or email account from which the letter was sent will be blocked is very high. After all, not a single recipient from these lists subscribed to the mailing list or allowed their mailbox to be used for these purposes. This means that the sent letter will be regarded as spam in its purest form. In addition to the psychological negativity caused by unsolicited email, there is also such a factor as administrative and even criminal liability for spam, which exists in a number of countries. In Russia, so far only administrative liability for the distribution of spam is provided.

1 Spam-traps - spam traps, ordinary-looking addresses (for example, [email protected]) or even entire domains. They are located in places where a regular user will never go, but where a robot (email extractor) will get to get an address for mass emailing. The purpose of using traps is to find the IP addresses of large sources of spam emails, as well as to determine the typical content of spam emails.

You can independently assemble a database of several thousand addresses using special programs, for example, the fully functional paid version of EMailFinder. The disadvantages, as in the case of a purchased database (mailing to addresses collected without the direct indication of their owners about the desire to receive correspondence from you), are punishable spam plus the risk of losing the domain. Spam-traps-addresses and spam-traps-domains are created just for such address extractors!

2. Formation of your own mailing list

The best address for mailing is the one that the client personally left when registering on your website. There can be several platforms for collecting such registrations: an official website, an official blog, a blog on a public resource such as Livejournal, and so on. And in all these places I advise you to place a subscription form, a form for collecting addresses. The conversion rate here is much higher than when using purchased and stolen addresses. The visitor deliberately left the address on the website of this particular company, therefore, having received a letter from it, at least he will read the first one.

One of my clients, the owner of the Ozon hotel chain in the Elbrus region, added a subscription field to the hot and seasonal offers of his chain to the guest registration form. Approximately 75% of guests became its subscribers, and the effect was obvious: the number of regular customers increased by 35%, even without taking into account the increase in those who visited the hotel for the first time on the recommendation of friends who subscribed to the newsletter.

How to work with freelancers: the pros and cons of freelance programmers

When creating a mass e-mail mailing list, you can limit yourself to only the names and email addresses of clients, but it is better to think in advance what other information may be required in the future. And at the first opportunity, include more questions in the form. Detailed information about each client will allow you to divide recipients into groups, find out their requests, and more carefully formulate your mailing list. At the same time, we must not forget about the risk of scaring off potential clients with overly complex questionnaires.

It is important to convincingly assure the subscriber that information about him will never be transferred to third parties by writing this in large letters next to the subscription form.

Function The opt-in 1 function is especially relevant when organizing a subscription on your own website.

1 Double opt-in - a subscription algorithm in which the address entered into the database requires confirmation of the owner (usually a click on a special link is required) before letters are sent to him.

Table. Ways to create a database for email newsletters

Type of mailing	Base quality	Cost, examples
Ordering a mailing to a third party contractor		9 million Mail.ru addresses - 35,000 rubles. Mailing to legal entities in St. Petersburg - 3900 rub. Mailing to individuals in Ukraine - 7800 rub.
Independent mailing to addresses of someone else's database	Low, there is a high probability of domain blocking.	Base of 100,000 addresses in Belarus - up to 3,500 rubles.
Mailing to a database collected by your robot	Low, there is a high probability of domain blocking.	The cost is the purchase of a robot program and payment for the services of a technical specialist to organize the mailing.
Newsletter through the database by registering on your website, blog	High. Safely. Not spam. It is recommended to use opt-in.	Cost - payment for news copyright services and technical tasks for mailing.
Thematic public free mailings on public resources	High. Safely. Not spam. But direct access to the subscriber database is closed.	Cost - payment for news copyright services.

3. How to avoid getting into spam? Accurately obtain customer data

The form for obtaining an address should be functional, detailed, and at the same time appropriate to the context of the mailing. For example, if a company sells cars, you should ask about the make and year of production of cars in the client’s fleet, but you should not be interested in your favorite type of coffee.

If the form looks like a subscription to news, a regular newsletter, they usually ask you to provide only your email address, rightly believing that nothing else is required to receive news.

In the case of mailing letters about discounts and promotions, a person expects to receive more information, which means it is natural to request additional information: Full name (preferably in separate fields), gender, date of birth (not age!). And there is no need to make the “Year” field mandatory; it would be nice to leave the option to fill in only the birthday, without the year. Maximum information (territorial reference, phone number and some other parameters) can be obtained from the client during the next contact. For example, in the form of ordering goods or drawing up a contract, for example an offer agreement. In practice, by announcing sales, for example, the online power tool store has built a subscriber base of approximately 800 people. With an average conversion of 8%, this allows the store to receive about 22–24% additional profit.

4. Thematic mass emails

This is one of the most effective tools for attracting new customers, forming a target audience and promoting a website. Thematic mailings can be another tool for collecting an address database.

The main thing is to publish regularly, write interestingly and on the topic. If these simple rules are followed, the peak in site traffic usually coincides with the release of the next newsletter issue.

An example of a service for public thematic mailings in mount 1 - one of the oldest resources Rasmas.info. In RuNet these are subscribe.ru, content.mail.ru, maillist.ru. By the way, subscribe.ru has a nice function for automating Zaraz mailings: you can specify your account information in the Maillist and Content systems.

1 The Belarusian part of the Internet, about 70,000 websites, approximately half of which are located in the .by domain zone.

Why new clients and public thematic services? It’s very simple: these services make money by placing advertisements that they sell in clients’ mailing lists. Consequently, these services are very interested in the success of the newsletter itself.

So, the popularity and promotion of a resource like subscribe.ru or maillist.ru plus the support of the service itself work for the customer. And all this is free.

The task of a company interested in establishing online relationships with consumers is to create a high-quality thematic mailing list of letters and regularly fill it with interesting material. Particular attention is paid to the first few issues. As a rule, services give newcomers so-called samples - a public announcement of a new newsletter, an appearance on the main page, etc. That is, the first three or four issues can count on free promotion, and during this time you need to manage to attract attention. Wherein The first issues should under no circumstances contain any advertising, either explicit or hidden.(except for the one posted by the service itself, but readers have already become accustomed to it).

If you take the organization of mailings seriously, after a month or two a new company will receive a fully functional tool.

The main disadvantage of these systems is that the subscriber base remains the property of the service. If you decide to change services or work independently, keep in mind: officially, clients cannot receive a list of their readers from the service. Although you can combat this by posting information about your subscription form in the mailing list. As a bait, use, for example, a message that the newsletter will not contain third-party advertising. It would be nice to encourage readers to ask questions, and use your own website and your own form for adding subscribers as the address for the dialogue. You can do this in different ways: offer to discuss a specific problem, put forward a deliberately controversial thesis that will draw the audience into the discussion, or contact the readers directly with the following text, for example, at the end of a mailing letter: “If you have questions, we will be happy to answer on them. Please leave your question here” - and thus send them again to the address of the page with the subscription form.

5. Choosing a platform for mass emailing

The next question that needs to be resolved before the distribution is carried out is how exactly to distribute the issues? The simplest thing is from your computer with your email program. This method has many disadvantages. Let me give you an example.

The Belarusian transport company has organized a newsletter - please note - to employees working remotely. The volume of the database was 200–300 addresses, the frequency of mailings was 2–3 times a week. They distributed information about the company's workload, business processes and similar things. Theoretically, no one could complain, but nevertheless the domain ended up on the spam list.

In addition, when using this method, it is difficult to process the address database - automating the replenishment of the database, unsubscribing, etc.

If you still find sending from your computer the most suitable method, you can create special programs - scripts - to automate it. The disadvantages here are almost the same as in sending with your own email program. An additional disadvantage is that not all scripts are equally reliable. An additional plus is that, at least when using external hosting, you do not load the office Internet channel.

6. Organizing mailings using GMail + Google Docs

Public and free Gmail, when used correctly, can help organize mailing to 100–500 addresses at a time, using a combination with another free service - Google Docs ( see figure 2). But the risk of domain blocking during mass mailings and the complexity of managing lists of addresses with this method remain the same.

7. Mailing letters using commercial systems

Paid services also help organize mailings. For example, the tvy.Sender system (http://sender.by) provides the ability to send mailings for free in a fully functional mode with a database of up to 100 recipients and up to 1000 letters per month. If you need more, please pay: there are two tariff plans - “Rarely” ($0.03 per message, no subscription fee) and “Frequently” (from $10 per month).

A public mailing service such as “[email protected]” also has paid professional functionality. With a subscription fee of $40 per month, you can send out 50,000 letters per month. Subscribe.pro (subscribe.ru) for $33 per month allows you to send 10,000 emails per month.

8. How to avoid getting into spam when composing a mailing message

When organizing periodic mailings, it is very important to provide subscribers with useful information. Receiving dozens of messages every day, a person opens only a few of them. Those in which he hopes to find useful information. And blatant advertising and uninformative boastful remarks are perceived as spam, possibly punishable.

It is better to send a short summary and a link to the full text of the message. A large volume of letters is intimidating just by its appearance. Although, if subscribers were promised that the newsletter would contain useful articles, you should not deceive them and feed them only announcements. Let each issue of the newsletter contain one small article and announcements of subsequent ones.

The text of an email letter does not provide many opportunities to play up the nuances of the message. But by using spaces, asterisks, capital letters, quotes and other symbols, you can visually divide the letter into parts (this makes it easier to perceive), highlight the main ideas, and draw attention to what is especially important to convey to the subscriber. It's best not to use capital letters for large parts of the text, as they make it seem like the author of the message is shouting.

It is worth checking the spelling and punctuation of the mailing texts several times. Letters must be impeccably literate.

How to avoid getting into spam from the very first words? The first thing the recipient sees in their mailbox is the subject and the name of the sender. And the impression they make largely determines whether he will open and read the letter. It is better to include specific information in the header of the letter - numbers, facts. Fewer general phrases - more specifics that highlight this particular commercial offer. The name and address of the sender must correspond to the subject of the letter: a serious business proposal from the address “Vovan [email protected]» is unlikely to inspire confidence. The subject line of the letter is the slogan, the description, the quintessence of the entire message. It's worth taking the time to come up with a proper, beautiful, catchy, and truthful title for your letter. It was not by chance that I highlighted the word “truthful”; this factor may turn out to be decisive.

Another rule is maximum personalization of the newsletter. We write “you” more often, if possible even “you”, we refer to facts known about a particular customer (full name, last visit to your company, recent order, etc.).

Effective mailings: how to double your sales with an email

Organizing mailings with attachments, as a rule, does not give effect, because... Most are deleted without reading for reasonable security reasons. Viruses are a serious problem, and attachments are a popular way to spread them. Therefore, I recommend asking recipients if they accept attachments and in what format. To do this, you need to add one more question (field) to the subscription form: “Accept attachments? Yes. No".

A sufficient frequency of mailing is once a month for company news and once a week for information portals (of course, there are exceptions - non-standard or very popular projects). It is optimal to start with once a month. Then you can increase the frequency of your newsletter as demand grows. For example, the Hydepark portal sends a selection of news from the past day every morning.

The fully functional paid version of EMailFinder can independently collect addresses. It can search and analyze thematic sites for the target audience using a list of phrases from the Yandex.Direct search results, an email address in a given country (region), including encrypted JavaScript.

9. Checking the effectiveness of mailing letters

If we assume that by the effect of a newsletter we mean the number of client transitions to our company’s website, to assess success, the website must have a statistics counter. Professional targeted email marketing tools also provide their own complete statistics on the process.

If you outsource your mailings, you can request the following information from the contractor: the total number of letters sent, the number of reads, clicks to the site, the percentage of message delivery, the percentage of bounces and ending up in spam, the number of mailing refusals (clients asked to unsubscribe from their address) .

In your service refusal form, be sure to ask leaving subscribers why they are refusing. The information obtained will help improve your mailing list, and perhaps even your business structure.

10. How to avoid getting spammed: organizing split testing

With the help of split testing, you can track errors made during the formation of the mailing list. Thus, the head of the Info MG publishing studio was dissatisfied for a long time with the weak response from subscribers. I carefully analyzed the statistics of the system used and discovered that the headers of the publishing studio’s letters were typically spam, so most of them were filtered automatically, and many users deleted the rest without reading them. When the headline was changed, the response doubled, and the profit from each sale increased by 30%!

The essence of the method is sending out two or three versions of a letter to a limited but representative sample. For example, one letter is sent on a white background, the second on green, the third on black. And then an analysis is carried out to determine which letters received the greatest response. Or two options for the letter title or text are used. But you shouldn’t change several factors at once - it will be difficult to understand what exactly led to the increase in response.

Vitaly Trakhtenberg graduated from the Belarusian State Radio Engineering Institute (BSUIR) in 2000, since 2004 - a practicing specialist in the field of Internet marketing and search engine promotion. He teaches a course in Internet marketing at the Belarusian State University and BSUIR.

Trakhtenberg Consulting Agency registered in 2009. Specialization - comprehensive Internet marketing, from website creation to full online business promotion. The team consists of five specialists, three more vacancies are open. Official website - www.tca.by