Spam traps can feel like email’s version of booby traps. Even if you know they exist and prepare for them, you can still find yourself caught and at their mercy.
But you don’t have to tread email marketing in fear. You can protect your sender reputation even if you’ve been caught by spam traps in the past.
In this post, we provide seven tips that can help you protect your email reputation and improve your email hygiene.
Let’s dive right in!
What is a spam trap?
Think of all the times you’ve given an invalid email ID to the restaurants and services you went to because you knew they would send you thousands of emails just to tell you about the most boring, basic offers.
Spam traps are something like that (and created for the same purpose, too).
They’re inactive or fake email IDs set up by ISPs (like Google, Outlook, Yahoo, etc.), blocklist operators, and anti-spam organizations to block unwanted emails. For example, spam trap emails can look something like noreply@spamtrap.com or johndoe@oldspamtrap.com.
If you end up sending emails to a spam trap email ID, these organizations/ISPs think you’ve bought an email list or scraped the internet. This can negatively impact your sender score, leading to different penalties (e.g., all future emails might end up in the spam inbox).
This is also why your favorite newsletter creators ask you to shift their emails from the spam/promotional folder to the inbox folder—it helps them improve their engagement metrics (and, ergo, their sender reputation).
How spam traps affect sender reputation
If you send emails to spam traps, it makes ISPs believe you’re using questionable practices (e.g., sending bulk emails without consent, using email lists, or ignoring opt-out requests), which is why they put a penalty on your email address and put you on a block list.
This entails one (or more) of the following possibilities:
- It won’t make sense to invest in email marketing in the longer run due to reduced efficiency.
- Your sender score will be ruined (for reference, this is your email’s version of a credit score).
- It might reflect poorly on your affiliates, partners, and sponsors.
- Your future emails will be filtered (and sent to the spam box).
- Your message won’t reach its intended audience.
- You’ll see lower engagement rates.
How to check your sender reputation
Before diving into solutions, it’s essential to understand the current state of your sender reputation. Here’s how you can gauge the impact:
Know your sender score
Free tools like SenderScore.org will analyze factors like spam complaints, bounce rates, number of active/inactive subscribers, and email engagement before giving you a quick snapshot of your sender reputation.
(They’ll usually place you between a score of 0-100, with 0 being the lowest end of email reputation).
Check IP and domain denylisting
Denylisting, also phrased as “deny” listing, is a type of blacklist that has a record of IPs and domains that have been deemed untrustworthy for sending unwanted, hateful, or spam emails. Tools like MXToolbox or Spamhaus will easily tell you if you’re on any industry-relevant denylist.
If your domain ends up on any denylist, ISPs reserve the right to reject your email or to send it directly to spam and junk inboxes.
7 ways to improve and repair email reputation
We previously spoke about how easy it is to become a part of a spam trap, but there are solutions to get out of the trap, too. Here are the seven ways you can improve and repair your email reputation.
1. Collect emails organically
This one’s basic, but the most common reason businesses end up with spam traps is they use email lists (usually purchased from a third-party service provider) or leverage bots to scrape the internet for email addresses.
Even if you feel like you’re dealing with reputation email list providers, it always makes sense to collect and grow your email list organically—be it through outreach, paid ads, offline market, or anything else—so that you’re reaching out to people who actually want to hear from you.
A quick tip: Consider investing in lead magnets or hosting giveaways, as they often help collect email IDs of people interested in your niche or product.
2. Email verification
You can rely on a tool or software to verify your email list to ensure you’re not sending emails to unwanted recipients (or to have 1000% faith that no one else has signed up on their behalf). This process helps you identify legitimate email addresses that real humans use.
Email verification will not only help you avoid deliverability issues, but it will also improve your engagement metrics (and, ergo, your sender reputation). As for the big question, “How do I verify my email list?”—You can use tools like Breadcrumbs to verify your entire email list (or even singular email IDs) for free!
3. Use double opt-in
Double-opt-ins are a more user-focused and manual version of email verification. In this version, the user first signs up for your email list on the web and then confirms their subscription by clicking a “Verify Email” link sent to their inbox in real time.
This is something many businesses and newsletters do to ensure they’re not a part of spam traps.
The double-opt-in process not only helps reduce invalid sign-ups (thus allowing you not to pay extra for subscribers who don’t want to be in your email list) but also helps you get better engagement rates, increases your trust with ISPs, and improves your email reputation.
When managing your email campaigns, consider cloud compliance alongside double opt-in. Ensure your cloud services comply with industry standards to help protect sensitive data and avoid legal pitfalls. Cloud compliance also maintains your email systems’ integrity, ensuring your emails reach the right audience.
4. Prioritize user engagement
Here’s how the process works: Prioritizing user engagement leads to higher engagement, which signals to ISPs that you’re a trusted domain, which helps you improve your email reputation and sender score. Hence, prioritizing user engagement is vital in email marketing.
Here are a few things you could consider:
- Sharing expert insights (e.g., a fashion newsletter can share a designer’s insights on what to wear in the upcoming season).
- Trying out different subject lines (i.e., experimenting with tones, emojis, word count, etc.) to see what sticks.
- Sharing assets they’d be interested in (e.g., checklists or research reports).
- Only delivering action-packed and valuable content.
- Testing out your email layout, cadence, and style.
5. Make it easy to unsubscribe
A good tip in email marketing is always making it easy for users to unsubscribe.
This rule has plenty of benefits, but the most important one is that you’ll send your emails to active subscribers who want to hear what you have to say.
This means they’ll open your emails often enough and perhaps click on a link or two occasionally, resulting in positive engagement (and a positive email reputation) for you.
Also, don’t forget to allow email users to unsubscribe from your email.
6. Clean your email list regularly
Suppose your subscribers don’t unsubscribe, but you know you have a segment of an unengaged audience who doesn’t read your emails—in that case, it’s time to clean your email list (and experts suggest doing this regularly).
This will have the same effect as non-subscribers (aka, you’ll only send your emails to an engaged and active audience, which will improve your trust and sender score). But aside from that, you’ll also get to personalize and optimize your emails according to your audience.
The below images will provide some more input on your email-list-cleaning-related questions!
7. Choose the right sending cadence
Last but not least, the final tip is to find the right cadence to send emails. You don’t want to be the business that bombards your customers with three emails daily, nor do you want to send emails so infrequently that they forget about you.
Some companies (like Fenwick Media) state in their first email that they’ll write to you if they have something interesting to share. Other companies use a tried-and-tested email cadence (e.g., twice a week).
Your best bet would be to run A/B tests and see what works best for you (or you could even ask your subscribers how often they’d like to hear from you and customize or segment your audience according to their preferences).
Final thoughts
Now that we know what to do to avoid spam traps and how Breadcrumbs can help you in this process (Hint: We have a free email verification tool), you’d also be happy to know other interesting use cases of Breadcrumbs:
- It can analyze advanced analytics like your audience’s demographics and behavior patterns to give you complete insight into how to convert them
- You can use it to find your most engaged leads (through the help of lead scoring models)
- You can learn more about your audience’s attributes (e.g., their job, industry, etc.)
- It can identify ideal customer profiles (ICPs) for you
On that note, to really experience the tool’s full capabilities, you can book a free demo to see it in action and consider whether it’ll be a value addition to your tech stack!
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