Email marketing is an integral part of every business that can give the best customer experience. It has the most efficient ROI (Return of Investment) among all marketing strategies. Marketers are fully aware that email marketing that increases conversions in a business is one of the best ways to maintain a lifelong relationship with the customers and the newly generated leads. If you care about increasing your customers organically, it is of crucial importance to consider email marketing for your business.
Spam emails take up space in many inboxes around the world. However, inboxes have become way too strong in filtering spam emails thanks to modern technology. As a result, we do not see many spam emails as we used to about 10 years ago. Another reason is that anti-spam tools and solutions such as SpamAssassin have emerged to contribute to the filtering process of spam emails.
Many email senders choose SpamAssassin and its score to improve their emails so that their emails are not recognized as spam. If you want to use SpamAssassin but do not know how you have chosen the right article to read.
Why Is Email Marketing Important for Your Business?
As already mentioned, email marketing generates the highest ROI for every business. It means that, if for example, you invest 1 dollar in email marketing, you will get 38 dollars in ROI. So, if you are looking for shortcuts to get the budget back and enjoy the interest, you should go for email marketing.
We all have encountered that ‘Register’ CTA whenever we want to buy something online or use a service. To register, it is necessary to insert our email addresses first. So, the brand that we are buying from will have our email address. That is what you should do to create an email recipient list for your email marketing strategy. With all those emails, you can introduce your business, announce the new offers, and give updates to your newsletter subscribers. In other words, you can create the desired relationship with your audience.
To engage your email subscribers list with your emails, it is important that you have thought-provoking and captivating content in your emails. With good content, conversion of the newly generated leads and retention of former customers are guaranteed.
Above all, email is perhaps the most professional instrument for business communications among businesses. One awesome advantage of emails is that they can be tracked and monitored. So, you can know if your email marketing strategies are going in the right direction. You can check the number of opens, forwards, social shares, bounces, etc. using the available email tools.
What is SpamAssassin?
SpamAssassin is an easy-to-install tool that is set up on a mail server to filter spam emails. SpamAssassin uses several techniques such as Bayesian and DNS filtering which are known as SpamAssassin blacklist.
Another contribution that this tool can make to your business is to test your email deliverability before you send them to your end-users. The test goes on in a way that SpamAssassin analyzes your email and gives it a score. If the score of your email is low on a scale of 0 to 5, there is a higher chance for it to be delivered to inboxes.
How SpamAssassin Scores Your Emails?
SpamAssassin generates a header for each email with a set of defined rules and points. The tests that are done by SpamAssassin will give a list of factors that affect your score. Each factor is shown by title in capital letters, a short description, and a numerical score. These factors can be suspicious links, suspicious extensions, not-allowed scripts, spammy content, etc.
How to Decrease Your SpamAssassin Score?
The best way to lower your SpamAssassin score is to solve the issues that are diagnosed by SpamAssassin. Here are 7 tips to lower your SpamAssassin score:
Build an Efficient Sending History
The spam filters that check your emails pay a lot of attention to your sender’s reputation. Each email that you send has a direct effect in building a sending history for your IP. The more you work on the content of your email to make them more engaging, the better your sending history will be. On the other hand, if you have frequent bounces in your emails, it means that your recipients are reporting your emails as spam or are ignoring them because they are not engaging.
Use IPs and ESPs
To send emails, you are free to choose between shared IPs, dedicated IPs, or reputable Email Sending Providers (ESPs). If you care about the budget of your business, you can go for shared IPs and the ESPs that give you high-quality sending domains at a good price. Using these methods is more time-efficient than sending many emails through your Gmail account.
Use Email Authentication
Legitimate email servers have to have email authentication because it is effective against phishing. So, every email will get SPF and DKIM records configured by the email authentication service. As a result, you can improve or decrease your SpamAssassin score and reduce the risks of being recognized as spam.
Be Careful of Blocklists
You should always check for the factors that get your emails into the blocklists. Check if you are listed in any blacklists. Do not hurry up in sending bulk emails and make sure if you have permission to send emails to your recipients.
Be Careful of Frequency
There is a limitation with almost every channel or social media. Just as there are Instagram daily limits, there is a limitation for sending out emails regarding the number of emails and the volume of recipients. These limitations are set in order to stop users from doing mass activities.
Sending out too many emails within a short time is another reason that you may be reported as a spammer. You should be careful not to send out a large number of emails in a short time span. Managing the timing of your emails is very important in the non-recognition of your emails as spam.
Moreover, if you do not send any email for a long time and then send out your newsletter to a large group of recipients, it is highly likely that your email gets known as spam. Therefore, you should increase the number of your email recipients step by step. This is where the segmentation of recipients appears crucial to your emails. Segmentation of your email recipients helps you to send emails to different groups of recipients on different days. So, you save your emails by caring about the right timing and reasonable volume of recipients.
Watch Out Your Textual Content
One of the spam factors that SpamAssassin is serious about is some words that are offensive or aggressive or are spammy in general. In order to keep your email away from the spammy textual content, you can check out the list of spam words and use the alternatives of the words that are known to be spammy.
7. Check the Ratio of Text:Image
As you surely know, content is not just textual. Visual content is of extreme importance when it comes to emails. However, you should be aware that SpamAssassin is against using too many images and visuals. Therefore, your text:image ratio has to be acceptable to SpamAssassin. The rule that you should not breach is that your images should not exceed 40% of the total message body.
How to Work with SpamAssassin?
Have you not ever used SpamAssassin on your server? We will explain the tips on how to implement it.
The very first thing you need to do is to decide on the spam threshold. The default measurement is 5 as we already pointed out. Remember that the lower your SpamAssassin score, the better.
If your score is more than 5, your email will not sit in the inboxes of your recipients as it is spam. Try to review the SpamAssassin report and improve every factor that is recognized to be spam by SpamAssassin.
If you are still getting reports on spam after improvements, you should try to lower your spam threshold to 4 instead of 5.
One thing you should always pay attention to is that ignoring your score on SpamAssassin can surely result in the blocking of your emails even if they are not spammy in your point of view. Therefore, it is necessary that you always check for your Snap Assassin report and decrease your score as much as you can.
Conclusion
SpamAssassin is an easy-to-use, free, and efficient tool that helps you optimize your emails for inboxes before sending them. As spam filters are not always without errors, you should use tools like SpamAssassin to check your spam score. Checking your email via SpamAssassin does not take much of your time but gives your emails a lot of efficiencies that are really worth it. So, use it and save your emails from the spam boxes. Wish you the best of luck!
