Avoiding Getting Classified as Spam

Matt Page

We've just switched from MailChimp to OnEx and now the data is in, the results are not good. Open rates are down from about 21.3% to 15.7%, though click throughs are about the same.


There are a number of reaons why this might be including the fact we've upped the number of emails we send in the last month, but a couple of Hotmail users said the new messages have gone straight to their spam folders whereas the MailChimp messages - seemingly identical otherwise - never did. Admittedly 'anecdote' is not the singular of 'data', but this combined with the stats...


Anyone have any ideas about why this is or what can be done to amend it? Is this something I should be talking to Blackbaud about? My colleague - not an RE user - thinks it's their fault. I'm not sure I'm going to get any response to doing what she suggests ("telling them to sort it out").


Matt


P.S. I should add I have read the bit on "Email tips and best practice" on the OnEx send message window and this page - https://www.blackbaud.com/files/support/helpfiles/bestpractices/email/Email.htm

Matt Page

Also, we changed the sent-from address from "no-reply@" to "marketing@". That wasn't the plan, but seems to have happened anyway. I guess that's probably part of the problem.

Michele Stender

Let's keep an eye on this as the year goes on but we know that an increase in list size can take a toll on your open rates. Also, changing your reply to as you mentioned can have an impact on where things go in some inboxes. For example, with gmail if the recipient moved your emails to their primiary tab when you were using the "no-reply@" but as soon as you changed that to "marketing@" it moved back to the promotoions tab because gmail didn't recognize the address. This could be a possiblity.

 

Mary Weaver

We send email from both OLX and GetResponse, and messages sent from OLX seem to end up in spam/junk folders more frequently. Even my test messages from OLX often end up flagged as spam.

Faith Murray

Lol, we've had the same problem with our own email server blocking our test emails with OLX. We've had to ask our IT to add the Blackbaud source email address to our safe senders list. I think it's a risk that comes with using any company that processes large amounts of clients for email distributions. It's not BlackBaud's fault per se... what happens is that one of BB's clients sends a spammy-looking message, and a donor gets sick of it and flags it as spam. That spam report gets sent to spam reporting agencies, which flag the email sender at different levels of spam warnings. There are mulitple spam reporting agencies, and it's up to the IT department of the company hosting the email acounts to determine the rigorousness of the security level they use for spam blocking. That's why one email agency may discard the message as spam, while another one with a lower security selection does not. Blackbaud's just the middleman, so I doubt thay can do anything to change it except to constantly re-apply to the spam reporting agencies to have their names removed from the spam lists.

Mary Weaver

You're right--it's just a factor of sending mail via lists. 


Occasionally I have used a free service (https://www.mail-tester.com) that will assess individual messages, give them a spam score, and provide detailed info on how the score was determined.

Matt Page

Mary Weaver:

You're right--it's just a factor of sending mail via lists. 


Occasionally I have used a free service (https://www.mail-tester.com) that will assess individual messages, give them a spam score, and provide detailed info on how the score was determined.

Thanks everyone for your responses.


Matt