A central part of outbound sales development growth takes place through email communications. It's one of the foundations that Biscred's database is built on -- providing our users with contact information for professionals and businesses that operate in the commercial real estate space.
This post is part of a series of helpful, educational content that helps ensure you're following best practices with your email marketing efforts.
Jamie Kim, Biscred's Product Manager, put together this helpful post based on her experience working with sales engagement, sales enablement, and outbound sales teams. There is no sure-fire answer for how to stop emails from going to spam, but there are best practices that can reduce and prevent emails from going to junk folders.
What Does CAN-SPAM Mean for B2B Commercial Real Estate?
In short, CAN-SPAM applies to commercial emails, also known as outbound email marketing, and, if the intent of the email is commercial — to advertise or promote a product or service — the sender must:
Include an email address (typically with a company domain, as in @biscred.com or @microsoft.com) within the email
Allow users a way to opt out of further emails
Identify messages as advertising
Not contain misleading or false information
There are other points that CAN-SPAM covers, but those are beyond the scope of Biscred’s audience of commercial real estate professionals.
There are two types of emails where CAN-SPAM unsubscribe rules don’t apply:
Transactional emails (receipts for purchase, for example)
Relationship emails (communications between sales and customers, safety recall notices, warranty information, or changes in terms of service are examples)
If you’re doing all the right things, and your B2B prospecting emails are still getting flagged as spam or junk, it may be time for a health check of your email process. In the next section, we cover 7 reasons your business emails may not be able to get past junk and spam filters.
Why Are Your Business Emails Going to Junk or Spam Folders?
Things that contribute to whether you get marked as spam culminates to something widely called your “spam score.” Email clients like Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, and others don’t explicitly reveal their spam-score algorithms, but we know they’re used across various blacklist systems to determine whether your email is spam.
These seven things that we know can affect whether your outbound marketing emails go to the inbox or junk folder.
Age of your domain
Similar to your credit score, how long a business has had its web domain is a contributing factor. If the domain and IP address it is sending from is fairly new, this raises eyebrows. So consider “warming up” newer domains with a lower send velocity and ramping it up to higher velocities over a span of time.
Email sending rate
Emails sent from a domain are typically at a consistent traffic rate, so any large spike in activity raises eyebrows as well. Be consistent when sending emails, as sudden low or high volumes in sending can negatively impact your spam score.
Audience-domain engagement
Emails sent to an email client’s domain (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc.) are tracked easily, so be careful what rate of emails you send to a specific user as well as others in their domain. Low/no activity on the email, which typically means opens and clicks, can damage your reputation with the receiving domain altogether, so you are more likely to reach spam folders if you have a lot of low engagement.
URLs should match your email domain
The links you attach should often match your domain. This includes unsubscribe links.
Avoid bounces
This should be an obvious one, but having a high bounce rate will most certainly impact your spam score, pushing your outbound marketing messages to more spam folders. What qualifies as a high email bounce rate? It’s hard to say. Some reports say 2% is acceptable, while others speculate 10%.
Google and other popular email providers are starting to crack down on their users’ bounce rates as well, with stricter guidelines being added more often, so check and follow your email provider’s guidelines.
As a best practice, remove bounced emails and …
Don’t resend to bounced emails
If an email hard bounces, immediately remove it from your automation. Sending additional emails to the same bounced email will continue to hurt your spam score.
Know your own sending limits
Email limits apply not only to bulk emails but also to manual, one-to-one emails. So, if your provider, say Google, has a limit of 5,000 outbound emails per week per user, you can avoid hitting this threshold by putting safeguards in your automation. Limit bulk sends to 4,500 outbound emails per week, which gives you a cushion of 500 for manual emails.
Hitting the limit can negatively impact your domain, but it can also mean locking your team out for an extended period of time while the limit is being hit and until it gets refreshed.
As we explained in a separate post about the February 2024 Google Email Spam rules, don’t try to game the system by sending 4,999 bulk emails; Google is smarter than that.
Sources
FTC, CAN-SPAM Act, accessed 2024-Feb-09
FTC, CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business, published 2023-August, accessed 2024-Feb-09