E-commerce e-mails going to customer spam folder (23)
Our sales team e-mails are going to customer spam folder. We send out invoices and bids on jobs and most of our e-mails are going to the spam folder. It's very unprofessional to have to tell the customer to check the spam folder for our e-mails.
I've checked http://whatismyipaddress.com/blacklist-check with our IP and domain name and nothing is flagged. We have multiple stores and all are reporting the same issue now.
I'm really close to changing our webserver IP address, and maybe even our domain name, but I'm hesitant to do so because of all the previous marketing we have done.
Anyone been in a similar situation? How did you work out of it?
Should I just advise the CEO to start with a clean slate?
How are your emails being sent? Do you have an spf record added to your dns?
Just added a SPF record, thanks!
would suggest you switch to a transaction email based SMTP like http://sendgrid.com/
it goes far beyond IP level blocks as all the major web based email systems use some unique algo to determine what gets inboxed at the client level...so even though you may not seem black listed google may be looking at you in a weird way....as an example one thing that prob many f you have noticed is that, if you get regular emails from a company and you don't open them consistently google will start to put them in spam...
All good suggestions! Your email must pass spf check and dkim too ideally so go create those TXT records. You are probably using the same domain for your business email, your transactional email, and your marketing emails. Your content is spammy or you spammed at some point. Using sendgrid is a great suggestion but it really depends what content you're sending and how bad your rep is. Getting a new domain/IP is not the solution, you need to identify the reason why you're going to spam. I can't advise you further without knowing all the details.
yeah I've read up on content filtering all day today... there are seriously a shit ton of variables. I currently use webmail horde/parallels for all of our employee inhouse and employee to customer e-mail. I use mynewsletterbuilder.com to send out our monthly newsletters, from the address admin@companyname.com, also based in horde/parallels. I thought that maybe since I am sending the monthly newsletter from the same @companyname.com domain, that maybe it was flagging all @companyname.com as spam now, thus the issue with employees in both stores getting there e-mail to customers marked as spam in the customers inbox.
How does sendgrid differ from webmail horde? Any recommended reading I could study up on? I asked my aunt (who had previously held the position I'm in) and she just said "e-mails end up in spam, tell them to whitelist you and it won't happen anymore" Unfortunately, I've told this to the employees for months now and they are just pissed off that it continues to happen and its unacceptable yada yada yada, which I agree with, there must be a solution somewhere.
sigh. /endrant
Here is what I got from support @ mynewsletterbuilder.com today
Most email programs have a ranking system which attributes a SPAM score to your email based on red flags such as:
ALL CAPS IN SUBJECT LINE
ALL CAPS elsewhere in the newsletter
punctuation in subject line
lots of/big images and not a comparable amount of text - you should try to include at least 1 paragraph per image - at least 600 bytes of text.
sales pitch related words like discount, blowout, special offer, deal of the century, FREE
link text that says "click here"
font color that matches background color exactly
successive/excessive exclamation points and successive punctuation marks
spelling out a full web address in the email like http://www.mynewsletterbuilder.com/ It's better to use a smaller word/phrase/link like website.
lots of bold font
overuse of big font
red font
having part of a web address as the link text that points to a slightly or completely different url - this is treated as a potential phishing scam.
Dollar signs/dollar amounts
words of "urgency" that urge someone to take some kind of action soon.
A great (paid) spam checking utility is http://www.emailonacid.com (also tests layouts in different email programs for display consistency). There are also many free spam checking utilities on the web.
Spam checkers can be very useful, but I think it is probably better just to thoroughly review this content filtering guide, and keep it in mind when composing your emails. We will also be happy to take a look at your newsletter for you, since a trained human eye may catch things that a single spam checking tool may not.
Some programs may send all email to the SPAM folder if it isn't from a recognized recipient, and in many email programs, this is a setting the user can choose to activate or deactivate. Here is a few link with instructions to send to recipients on how to add your address to their safe sender's lists and address books for several common email applications: https://www.mynewsletterbuilder.com/...e-senders-list.
Content filtering is usually not related to bounces. A bounce never makes it to the inbox or spam folder.
The webmail interface has two unfortunate downsides. It does add the sending IP of the user into the message headers as an abuse-tracking system, and second, the reason it does that, is because of the fact that web-based email accounts are often compromised. The reason that's an important factor is because this occurrence has lead to spam filters often treating web-based email systems, which they're able to detect, as having a higher likelihood of being spam. It may be worthwhile having some of your users who experience the issue more frequently try using a regular email program to see if it helps at all.
As far as outbound email goes; emails generated by your company using regular email client software will have their email leave by the IP address (ip address) which maps solely to domain. That of course is also beneficial from an anti-spam standpoint. Emails sent via webmail would leave the server via its primary IP address of (ip address).
sorry about the wall of text... been a long day...
I'd be willing to pay for a consultation at this point lol
Send me a PM with your domain, IPs, and briefly explain what you're doing, how many contacts in your database, and how often you're blasting, ie what kind of volume you're sending. I will run an analysis and post the results without revealing your company. Email is a deep and complicated subject once you get past sending a few dozen emails. Your salespeople are right; it's unacceptable that they can't reach clients.
Here are the areas I will look at:
- authentication: SPF, DKIM, DNS. SPF alone is pretty tricky, you need to make sure you have all IPs and domains added in the TXT record in your DNS and decide what kind of fail you want when there is no match, softfail, hardfail, etc.
- infrastructure: are your IPs/domains set up correctly
- content: is your code valid, do you have too many spammy words, etc
- reputation: blacklists, how much are your messages filtered, blocked. how many spamtraps you're hitting, your complaint level
I previously asked on STM if there'd be any interest in an e-book with all this good info, but there wasn't any. Not many people here play the email game, though it can be very lucrative.
OK, got your PM, I'll post my thoughts here for everyone's benefit.
1. You don't have dkim set up. It's an authentication method like spf. Contact your host and tell them you want that set up. Note that it involves making changes to your DNS.
2. You are sending your company emails from the wrong place. You are using your shopping cart's IP, which is absolutely terrible, because it's shared IP. A lot of companies are sending all kinds of garbage on that IP, so of course it's going to spam. Use your dedicated IP instead for your employees' outgoing mail, and not a single email will go to spam again.
3. I assume you're on a VPS account. I personally prefer cloud server with load balancers or dedicated servers so you can grow into them. This is low priority for now.
4. I hate Parallels. cPanel is more expensive but much better. See if they can upgrade you to that.
5. Your employees use webmail? Do they actually log into it in order to use email, like Horde/Squirrelmail? If so they must be tearing their hair out. Do they have their email account set up in Outlook on their computers? If not, they should definitely either use Outlook or Mac Mail. Alternatively, you can consider using Google Apps. You'll have your company email in a Gmail interface, and you'll be able to collaborate on documents. There's also Microsoft's Office 365, but it's more suitable for enterprises.
6. Your SPF record is set up to authenticate email sending from your server and from your shopping cart, but not from your newsletter site. In other words, when your newsletter goes out, the email is sent on behalf of your domain. However, since the newsletter site is not authenticated, your domain tells the receiving server: "Hey, I don't know anything about any newsletter. I didn't authorize that platform to send newsletters on my behalf." Your newsletter inbox and open rates - and your sales - would jump if you took care of that problem. You need to add the newsletter builder to your SPF record. There may be multiple domains or IPs to add. Check with them.
7. Have you thought about having a CTO or someone head up your IT? You have a nice company, but your infrastructure is poor. I am fairly certain I could double your sales by bringing your IT to a professional level setup. This is not an offer. i'm just saying that if I can, you should find someone equally qualified to lead your IT.
8. Everyone thinks they can scrape emails and get away with it. Everyone. I'm sure you've done so at some point. This means you need to have your list cleaned up to remove bad emails, because those hurt your deliverability. I own an email verification company, www.mxverify.com. Since your list is only a few thousand I'll verify it for you for free if you want. Send it to me at admin@mxverify.com.
9. Your setup in general is very basic and incorrect in a few places, so you're really just winging it. The good news is that there's a lot of room for improvement. This is a lot of information to digest I'm sure, and it's only a small part.
I just checked your HTML newsletter. I have been in the email marketing industry for many years, and this is positively the highest scoring spam newsletter I've ever seen. Such a clusterfuck that it scored 49.9 out of a spam threshold of 5. It means anything above 5 is bad. You're so far past the spam threshold that the threshold is a dot to you. I am surprised you're inboxing this AT ALL. SpamAssassin, which is usually lenient, rated it -10.1 (-5 and lower is spam)
To illustrate, I threw in the words "viagra" and "cialis" just for kicks, and it only went up to 51.5. Different spam checkers will give you different scores, but they'll all be bad for sure. The size of your newsletter is also very big, at around 250kb. You wanna keep it around 50kb. It's not mobile optimized and contains several errors.
A lot of room for improvement here too. If you're even doing semi-decent right now, by improving all these problems it will translate into hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in business.
Thank you so much, I'm honored to top the list as the greatest html clusterfuck you've seen LOL this will be a great point to look back on once I get this all sorted out. My Aunt told me "everything is fine, don't change it!" Well out with the old and in with the new! This is a lot to digest, but I can't say thank you enough for looking this over. Looks like I have a lot of work to do.
edit: thanks again! I hope one day I'll be able to help someone as much as you just helped me here on the forums.
No problem, just go step by step and let me know if you get stuck on any one of them. Your aunt did her best and is afraid of change, as we all are.
Response from CIO of Miva Merchant
> Contact your host and tell them you want that set up. Note that it
> involves making changes to your DNS.
If we set up DKIM, your email users would need to start sending email via an email program like Outlook and not the webmail. Additionally, emails sent by your store would not be signed. The reason for this is the DKIM header only gets added for emails sent using authentication; i.e. from an external source (like Outlook) through the server here. I don't think DKIM would make a significant difference in the current issue but we can try it if you'd like. It's a method of authenticating emails, similar to SPF but it authenticates the message headers and provides a way to validate them via a DNS record; so it would allow someone to authenticate the source of a message even if it were sent through a third party system.
> 2. You are sending your company emails from the wrong place. You are
> using your shopping cart's IP, which is absolutely terrible, because
> it's shared IP. A lot of companies are sending all kinds of garbage on
> that IP, so of course it's going to spam. Use your dedicated IP
> instead for your employees' outgoing mail, and not a single email will
> go to spam again.
Using Outlook would accomplish this. The characterization that your current setup is absolutely terrible is not the case though because you are not on a shared server; you're on a server shared with only one other customer, so the emails leaving the system from domains other than yours are minimal, just as we'd tell the other customer the same thing if they encountered problems because your emails would be the only ones other than theirs.
> 3. I assume you're on a VPS account. I personally prefer cloud server
> with load balancers or dedicated servers so you can grow into them.
> This is low priority for now.
You're not on a VPS account; you're on a half dedicated server where we've taken one server and provisioned it for the use of just two customers.
> 4. I hate Parallels. cPanel is more expensive but much better. See if
> they can upgrade you to that.
We have no plans to offer cPanel at this time; there are some architectural issues with cPanel that conflict with certain things we do from an overall server and network management perspective. Although Plesk is not ideal and has its share of complaints, it allows us to do certain things that we need to do. We do constantly evaluate alternatives though, including cPanel as new versions are released, as we'd prefer to offer whatever makes customers most comfortable.
> 5. Your employees use webmail? Do they actually log into it in order
> to use email, like Horde/Squirrelmail? If so they must be tearing
> their hair out. Do they have their email account set up in Outlook on
> their computers? If not, they should definitely either use Outlook or
> Mac Mail. Alternatively, you can consider using Google Apps. You'll
> have your company email in a Gmail interface, and you'll be able to
> collaborate on documents. There's also Microsoft's Office 365, but
> it's more suitable for enterprises.
He's basically advising you to do what I had outlined previously; moving them off the web-based email to a regular program. If you're opposed to Microsoft products or don't want to waste the money, the Thunderbird email client would be an excellent starting point.
> 6. Your SPF record is set up to authenticate email sending from your
> server and from your shopping cart, but not from your newsletter site.
> In other words, when your newsletter goes out, the email is sent on
> behalf of your domain. However, since the newsletter site is not
> authenticated, your domain tells the receiving server: "Hey, I don't
> know anything about any newsletter. I didn't authorize that platform
> to send newsletters on my behalf." Your newsletter inbox and open
> rates - and your sales - would jump if you took care of that problem.
> You need to add the newsletter builder to your SPF record. There may
> be multiple domains or IPs to add. Check with them.
Can you provide me with the entity you send the marketing emails through? I may be able to find out the necessary SPF changes from their website.
So here is where I'm at now. Some of our employees use the webmail based e-mail, horde, while others use outlook. I'm thinking about pushing everyone to use outlook and setting up DKIM as everyone is recommending to do so. I hope this would help get our e-mails out of customer spam folders.
edit: it also creates a new problem of e-mail sent by the server not being signed. what a headache...
Originally Posted by _mcr_
I used the built-in spam check in Interspire. Every email service provider pretty much has a spam testing tool you can use once you sign up with them. You can use Litmus as a standalone tester but it costs $149/mo.
For free tools, here's one of my best kept secrets: http://www.mail-tester.com/
You just send an email to the address it generates, and it rates your email and tells you how to improve it.
Your email rated 0/10, so I trust it. It's legit. 
Let me know how it goes.
sweet deal. so here is how I fixed it.
I made a newsletter directory, that just has short headlines and link bait and then links to the long full newsletter.
score this time a round: 7.3/10 
Cool, but keep working on it until you get it to 9+ out of 10. Also, you should put products directly in the newsletter. You lose a percentage of people with every extra step.
It's better to do: newsletter -> product page
than to do: newsletter -> full length newsletter -> product page
the first one will give you SIGNIFICANTLY more sales
_mcr_ gangster post dude.
interesting stuff.... never heard of the dkim thing.... just setup spf record.... need to get my bounces lower.... and clean the list a bit....
whats the mxverify thing?
hows it work?
Originally Posted by dconstrukt
It basically queries all mailservers in your list and removes as many bad addresses as possible. Some servers don't cooperate, like yahoo and hotmail, but pretty much all the rest do. If you send emails only to emails certified good, you'll reduce problems significantly and inbox more.
so what happens after it cleans the csv file... you just re-import the list?
asking cuz the email services don't usually let you import lists....
Originally Posted by _mcr_
Originally Posted by dconstrukt
Originally Posted by thetopham
I run the company myself and have cleaned lists for STM members before. I'll give you and dconstrukt a free cleaning if your lists aren't huge. Up to you.
The benefit of this service depends on whether your lists are clean or not. But until you do it, you don't know what's in your list.
Home > General > Affiliate Marketing Forum