Avoid Emails Being Marked as Spam

Introduction

Using the full feature set provided with the Chime product will ultimately include sending out large amounts of emails to your lead database. These can be property alerts, drip campaign emails, etc.

It is important to note that all mass emails, property alerts, and drip campaign emails will be sent from the "firstname.lastname@chime.me" email address assigned to each account created with Chime.  Also, although Chime has a reputation for not being marked as spam by the majority of recipients, each email service is different and there are some important things to keep in mind that you can help control. 

First of all, it is important to note that having emails marked as spam is very common in email marketing. Many email service providers have different filtering criteria to eventually consider emails as spam. Although the set criteria is reasonable, there will always be flaws in which emails are flagged as spam incorrectly. We’ve all been there. . . waiting on that important email only to discover it in the spam folder days later!

The general reasons for emails to be marked as spam are listed below:

• A certain amount of recipients mark your emails as spam
• Your emails have a low open rate
• You used spam trigger words in the email subject or body (such as "amazing," "free," "promise you," etc.)
• Too many responses to the sending email address have bounced
• There is no physical address in your email body
• HTML emails do not follow many email marketing best practices. They might include some branding elements that make the emails more likely to be marked as spam.

Summary

• General Suggestions
• Content Best Practices
• Chime-Specific Suggestions
• Our commitment at Chime

General Suggestions

1. Have leads add you as a contact to ensure your emails go through to their inbox
2. Have leads check their Spam folder and if they see your email encourage them to indicate that it is "Not Spam." This will help email providers recognize the sending email address as one not associated with spam.
3. Have leads add your "@chime.me" email address as a contact or “Safe Sender.” This will also improve the overall deliverability of your emails to your leads and will largely prevent your emails from going to their spam folders. If done when your account is brand new with Chime, this will drastically improve your reputation. As an example, this is how it is done in Gmail settings:
4. If your leads are using Gmail, have them create a filter to never send your emails to spam with the steps below:
5. Regularly "prune" and remove email addresses that do not respond to you or are fake email addresses. They may not be responding because they have marked your emails as spam which triggers the spam filters with certain email providers. Keep in mind that many email providers (like Google) look at unopened rates. So, if you keep sending emails to leads that do not have any interest or do not open your emails, then the email provider will automatically begin to classify your emails as spam.
6. Minimize the number of emails you send at one time. If you can break up bulk emails into several rounds this may allow more emails to go through. We recommend only sending 1-3 automated emails per week to a lead (this includes property alerts, snapshots, and market reports).
7. If you are sending too many blast emails out and are not getting engagement with those emails, it can also cause your email address to be marked as spam.
8. Make sure your emails are not considered "spammy." There are free tools online that you can use to check whether or not your emails contain common "spam words."
9. Within your emails, add as few images as possible. Plain text will typically result in better deliverability. 
10. In general, if leads seldom open or reply to your emails or they report them as spam, your email reputation will decline. If your email reputation declines enough, your email address can be marked as spam. You will want to make sure you are (a) sending good quality/engaging emails, (b) at the recommended frequency (see above), and (c) make sure to remove people from your distribution list who are not opening your emails. 

Content Best Practices

Based on our experience, email content plays a very important role in delivering your emails to a lead's inbox. Below are some email content suggestions that can be followed to improve email deliverability:

(1) Avoid using spam trigger words. Email service providers will use spam filters before delivering your email to a recipient's inbox. Most spam filters will scan your email content to find "suspicious words" such as "100%," "free," "earn money," "guaranteed," "promotion," etc. If these kinds of words reach a certain level, your emails will be marked as spam and will not be sent to the lead's inbox. So, an in-depth review of all email content and especially the email subject is very important.

• The following tools can help to review your content:
  • https://emailcopychecker.com/
  • https://brotherhood.zone/spamwordschecker.html
• Examples of spam word lists can be found here:
  • https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/30684/the-ultimate-list-of-email-spam-trigger-words.aspx
  • https://www.activecampaign.com/blog/spam-words

(2) Avoid sending emails that only contain images. When you set up your email templates, make sure that your content has a good balance between text and images. For most spam filters, if the Text-to-HTML is too low, email providers will mark your emails as spam. So, if you want to insert a lot of images into the body of your email, make sure to add enough text to have a good balance. Also, be aware that many email recipients will block all of the images in the email body by default.

Recently, MailChimp published an insightful blog posts and recommended following a 80:20 text-to-image ratio in emails, i.e., 80% text and 20% images. This is probably a good balance to look at obtaining.

(3) Send valuable content. At the core of any successful email program is a commitment to sending valuable and interesting content to your recipients. Every time you send an email that does not resonate with the person receiving it, the likelihood that your recipient will open or click your next email decreases. This, in turn, leads to a higher likelihood of having emails land in spam. So, it is important to treat your email campaigns as an extension of your brand to always work on delivering useful content to those who receive your emails.

Chime-Specific Suggestions

It is important to note that if you are a new Chime user, you will have a new "@chime.me" email address. Having a brand new email address send a massive amount of emails very soon after creation is an easy way to start off by dropping your email reputation as your email address will have no history to justify the "acceptable" sending of so many emails. The following would be the recommendations to follow when using Chime to maintain the best email reputation for your account. 

1. Welcome Emails. Always send Welcome Emails first prior to sending other marketing emails. Keep in mind, however, that sending too many Welcome Emails at once could also have a negative effect on your email reputation. Chime would recommend focusing on a select group of leads that are actually engaging with you (hot leads) that need to be transitioned smoothly and have the welcome email sent to them right away. Otherwise, you can manually send one-by-one at a later point (see Set Up the Welcome Email).
2. Sending Frequency. 
   • Property Alerts (Buyer):Set to weekly for the first 1-2 months and then you can adjust to be 2-3 times a week on a case-by-case basis as you interact with your clients.
   • Market Snapshots: Set to weekly for the first 1-2 months and then you can adjust to be 2-3 times a week on a case-by-case basis as you interact with your clients.
   • Mass Email: Do not send too many mass emails in one day. Less than 500 at a time is ideal. Chime will limit the number that can be sent at once to 200 emails, but you will want to avoid sending 200 mass emails multiple times in one day.
   • Smart Plan Emails: Do not auto-apply too many Smart Plans during the first 1-2 months. Consider only manually-assigning Smart Plans to leads that you know for a fact need specific content at that time.
3. Lead Import. When importing leads via CSV, Chime recommends that you do not import too many leads (less than 5,000) AND do not auto-trigger emails to these leads within the first 1-2 months of account creation while your email reputation has yet to be established. If there is a large number of leads that need to be imported, consider spreading this out to be done every few days instead.
4. Whitelist / Safe Sender / Not Junk or Spam. Send emails to trusted clients/leads that you communicate with on a regular basis and have them add the "@chime.me" email address to their whitelist/safe sender list in their email client. When done as a new Chime user (and therefore a new "@chime.me"email address) within the first 1-2 months, your email reputation will improve drastically. If the email goes to Spam (which can happen when an email is sent from a newly-created email address), work with these same leads to find those emails and mark as safe/not spam.

Our commitment at Chime

• We monitor our domain and IP reputation every day and our performance is guaranteed by Amazon. Our reputation is listed as good by Amazon so our IP is not blacklisted.
• We send tens of millions of emails for our customers every day and plan to continue to do so as effectively as possible.
• We have a solid reputation associated with our domain/service and will seek to maintain and always improve this reputation
• We will continue to run our service in compliance with ESPs and will be sure to follow their suggestions of separating IP, sending frequency, etc.

Questions?

If you have any questions regarding this topic or any others, please reach out to our Support Team via email at <support@chimeinc.com> or by phone at 1 (855) 981-7557.