Discovering that your email reputation has taken a massive hit because you’ve been flagged by a spam service organization is one of the hardest things you’ll need to deal with as someone responsible for email programs. When you get block-listed by a spam service organization, your email business grinds to a halt. Instantly, you will be prevented from sending fundraising appeals, welcome messages, event notifications…all of them!
If you’re reading this because it just happened to you, take a deep breath, grab a cup of coffee, and dig in to diagnose what’s happening and repair the situation. The reasons for getting block-listed are never the same for every organization, so this post will help you make sense of what’s going on and provide you with a series of tactics to help repair the situation. Please know that these are only suggestions. You should consult with your technical team, platform vendors, and senior management to determine the best course of action.
Now, buckle up, and let’s get down to business. Finding your organization on a spam block list will make you feel like your email reputation is crumbling around you. While this is an extremely unfortunate situation to find yourself in, you can and will repair your reputation. Let’s look at the key ways to reclaim your stellar email reputation and minimize your chances of ending up on one of these lists in the future.
How do you know you are on a spam block-list?
First, how did you end up here? To be “flagged by a spam block-list” means at a minimum that the IP address from which you’re sending email has been associated with some form of email spamming or scamming activity. If you send email from a shared platform (like Mailchimp, for example) you or some other organization/company on that service is being flagged for suspicious or behavior that does not respect the principles of permission based email marketing. If you’re sending mail from a dedicated set of IP addresses, you or your team specifically is being flagged for this suspicious behavior. Often, spam block-listing services will try to monitor your practices by putting an email address on your email file (often through an email registration web form) and determine that you didn’t ask people to confirm their opt in. When you or someone else mails those addresses, the spam block-listing service will alert Gmail, MSN, Yahoo! and other email service providers that you are on their block-list.
How will I know? Here’s how you might determine that your email reputation has taken a hit and why it happened.
- Your Engagement Takes an Instant, Massive Decline: If you recognize a sudden drop in your email deliverability rates, you can assume you have a problem. Especially if emails are not reaching a significant portion of your recipients (but they did in the past), it could be a sign you’ve been spam-listed. In some cases your delivery rate will fall to zero overnight! If your delivery rates, open rates, or click rates hit near-zero in a few days time, you’ve got a problem!
- Notifications from ESPs or Your Email Platform Vendor: Sometimes, though not always, Email Service Providers (ESPs) or your email platform vendor will send you a notification if they see you have been blocked or rejected due to spam suspicions. Take these notifications seriously, as reputable ESPs know what they’re talking about.
- Notifications from spam Listing Organizations: If you see crazy declines and suspect you’ve been flagged by a spam reporting service, check out their lists to check for sure. These websites provide tools to check if your emailing domain or IP address is listed on any spam block-lists.
Be careful – if you can’t find yourself on these, it doesn’t mean you’re in the clear! You might want to use a tool like MX Toolbox to search quickly for your emailing domain across many spam block lists at once.
How to get OFF a spam block-list
Your knee jerk reaction might be to immediately apply for delisting and fight against the powers that be. While that is a PART of the process, you have to make sure you take the necessary steps to avoid delist rejection, pushing you further into the spam black hole. Once you’ve decided you definitely are on one or more block-lists, be proactive and fix the problems that got you there in the first place. Doing these things first will help you make a strong case to the spam block-listing organization when you ask them to take you off the list.
Step One: Confidently Identify the issue: Why exactly were you listed? Were you sending unsolicited emails to a borrowed list? Did the recipients complain? Were you flagged for suspicious activity? How could you know? First, check out our article on how to avoid getting on a spam block-list.
- Review Your Email Sending Practices & List Hygiene: Be honest with yourself, have you been keeping your email list clean? Make sure the emails you have on your list came to you in the right way. Check how frequently you send emails – are you recipients getting fatigued? If you haven’t been monitoring your unsubscribers, bounces and inactive subscribers and just keep sending them emails, you’re on the fast track to a poor reputation.
- Check Email Content: Again, be honest with yourself. Have you been toeing the line between fair emails and sketchy ones? Too many exclamation marks or spam triggering words? Are you sending offers that are truly valuable to your audience? Ensure the emails you’ve recently been sending are providing value to the recipients with valuable and accurate information.
- Review Complaints and Feedback Loops: Have there been signs? Your ESP may have let you know you’ve been reported for suspicious activity. Have any of your recipients left reviews on your business, or replied to an email with a complaint? More than one? Never underestimate the power of a passionate recipient who wants spam emails out of their inbox for good.
- Check for Technical Issues: Before jumping to conclusions, check your email infrastructure for any issues that may contribute to deliverability problems. Is your email authentication in place (SPF and DKIM policies and DNS records) in place?
- Let me Say it Again; Check Your Email Authentication: Strengthen your email authentication protocols such as SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance). Proper authentication helps verify the legitimacy of your emails and can improve your sender reputation.
- Clean Your List of Poisonous Email Addresses: While not perfect, you can run your entire email list through an email cleaning service (e.g. ZeroBounce). These services will sort your email into a series of risk-based groups. The most risky are the ones they flag as addresses they know spam block-listing services are using – REMOVE THESE IMMEDIATELY. They will also identify email addresses associated with people who complain often or report marketers as spam. I would also recommend removing these people from your list, ASAP, as well.
Step Two: Take Corrective Action: Go after the root causes of the problems and repair them quickly. Do you need to add CAPTCHAs to all of your forms? Do you need to remove people from borrowed or rented lists from your email platform? Have you turned on double opt-in? Once you’ve identified the issues and are ready to request delisting from the spam services.
Step Three: Request Delisting: Luckily, you’re not stuck here forever. Nearly all spam services have a process for getting yourself off their block-list. Find the list you are unfortunately seated on and follow their instructions to submit a delisting request. This is where the previous step comes in handy. You’ll want to prove to them that you’re real and ready to adjust to acceptable practices. Come with documentation and demonstrate you are taking this seriously.
Step Four: Repair Your Reputation: Now that you’re off the spam block-list, you need to convince ESPs like Gmail and MSN that you’re really delivering value to your audience. Beyond getting delisted, you’ll need to demonstrate to ESPs that you are sending content that people want to engage with. You can show them that people ARE interested in your messages if you can show very high open and click rates over the course of four to six weeks. Queue up a few great emails and send them to super recent openers (e.g. people who have opened in the last 30 then 60 then 120 days). These people will open at two to three times your whole file. Slowly, open up your open/click window back to, say, 365 days.
And now you’re off?
Now that you’ve finally slept for the first time in three days…don’t take your eye off the ball. Make sure your teams are adhering to these strong principles to ensure you maintain a great reputation. Need more help? Get in touch and let our team help you sort things out and make a plan for success.
Finding your organization on a spam block list will make you feel like your email reputation is crumbling around you. While this is an extremely unfortunate situation to find yourself in, you can and will repair your reputation.
