The FTC has strict rules regarding commercial email and what qualifies as spam. The CAN-SPAM Act established requirements for commercial messages, such as giving recipients the right to have you stop emailing them and providing unsubscribe link, and it spells out tough penalties and fines for violations.  Marketier can help you comply with the rules of CAN-SPAM, starting with checking your email for the likelihood of getting caught and ensuring that you provide an unsubscribe link. You can find a full list of the requirements of the CAN-SPAM Act on the FTC website at http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus61-can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business.

See below for more information on

• How iAPPS Market helps you with CAN-SPAM requirements.

• What you can do to help assure your emails are delivered and not captured by spam filters

• Step Two of the Email Wizard: Create & Design provides an easy link to the CAN-SPAM Act so you can easily review its details while working on an email.

• Marketier sends a warning message if an author attempts to send an email or a response without an unsubscribe link. “You are missing an unsubscribe link for your recipients.  Are you sure you want to continue?” Marketier also has a site setting that Administrators can turn on that requires a link before any email can be sent.  (Some companies leave this off so that they can send internal emails without the link). 

• Marketier provides an automatic subscribe link within the system.  Your developer can set this up to unsubscribe users from only the current campaign, all email, or allow them to choose categories or specific email campaigns. This helps you meet the requirement to honor opt-out requests promptly.

• Step 4 of the Email Wizard has a "Check SPAM" button that sends your email to an external validator to be checked for the likelihood of being declared Spam. Then you can make changes before the email is sent.

• Marketier allows you to export a list of all unsubscribed addresses, which makes it easier to maintain any external databases. 

• The Email Run History also gives you unsubscribe information for each email run, as well as providing an audit history of individual contacts and their unsubscribe history.  You can use the information on the number of unsubscribe requests for any email as an internal validator to make changes to the contents of your emails as necessary.

• Contacts can also be manually unsubscribed or re-subscribed. 

Every spam filter has its own criteria to identify spam through a “spam score.” Individual users can also change their own security levels, which means there is no one easy way to detect exactly which messages might be labeled spam. However, understanding how spam filters identify spam can help you to create the least “spammy” messages.

It’s estimated that 10 – 20% of all emails get lost in cyberspace.  Monitoring your open rates will help you gauge when a mailing trended towards spam. (See the Email Run History for details).

The list below is not exhaustive, but has some guidelines to help you avoid getting caught in spam filters.

Address Fields

How you use the addresses fields affects your spam score. Avoid these mistakes. For more information, see also http://www.filterbuster.com/avoiding_spam_filters.html.

• Sending an email many times with a string of numeric digits in the Sending From: address in the email header - either starting or ending in a numeric string, or containing both alpha and numerics.

• Sent To: uses <undisclosed-recipients>.

• Sent To: has a missing address.

• Sent To: a single mailing list address, instead of sending individual mailings to each recipient.

• The Reply-To: header is blank or missing.

• The From: and To: headers have the same address.

• Excessive amount of CC: and/or BCC: headers

• To: or CC: headers contain many user names that are the same.

Subject Line

We often think about the subject line in terms of the best copy to catch our audiences’ eyes and improve open rates. But if your email is caught by a spam filter your chances of having your audience open the email significantly dwindles. Avoid

• Use of special characters including exclamation marks and question marks

• CAPS

• Unusual S P A C I N G or use of P.E.R.I.O.D.S.

• No subject line

• Colorful fonts

• Use of spam words or phrases such as “Viagra,” “Test,” “Teen,” “Free,” “Be Amazed,” or “Buy now!”

Body of the Email

Once your use of addresses and subject lines get through the spam filter, there is another piece of the email to be aware of, the body of the email.  Things to avoid here include:

• Sloppy HTML, usually copied from MS Word or other word processing program.  To avoid this, you can paste in text and strip out formatting in the Email Text Editor.

• One solid image without copy. Spam filters cannot read text on an image and may interpret this as trying to sneak content through.

• Use of Red text or CAPS is like yelling a message. Spam filters don’t like this.

• Any form of “remove” or removal instructions other than an unsubscribe link.

• Forms in the email instead of a link to a form on your website.