Business email: Make it Professional and Avoid Spam Filters

Are your emails reaching your customer’s inbox? Sending business email is an important part of your marketing strategy, so you want to make sure your emails go into your customer’s inbox and not to a spam folder. Two keys to successful emailing are knowing about spam filters and using a professional, business email address. Both will help ensure that your customers see what you send.

Spam filters: How do they work?

Most use a scoring system that assigns points to criteria they view as being potential spam. When the points exceed a preset threshold, the email is sent to the receiver’s spam folder. Certain words or phrases cost points, such as using the word “FREE” in the subject line.  Other criteria include:

• Is the email mostly HTML code?
• Does the sending domain have a correct Sender Policy Framework, or SPF, record, that identifies specific mail servers allowed to send email on behalf of your domain?
• Is the sending domain on a blacklist?

Spam filtering is done at the receiving end of the transmission, and you do not get to decide if your email is spam or not. The good news is you can influence the spam filter by knowing the scoring components and avoiding them when possible.

What can you do to avoid spam filters?

Many of the scoring components are details you can control, such as:

• Avoiding words or phrases that add points to the spam filter rating.

• Configuring your email server to use a proper SPF record.
• Sending from a professional business email address.

That last point deserves a closer look. Do you have a professional email address?

Setting Up a Professional Business Email Address

A professional business email address includes your domain name (business name) in it. It is different from a personal email address that includes the server name, such as your ISP provider, Gmail, etc. Sending an email from a personal email address, using server software, runs the risk of adding points to the spam filter rating. Here’s why:

The default way for most websites to send email is using the server software, sometimes called PHP wrappers or ‘sendmail’. Both send the email from the server and its default email address. This works fine for sending the email, but the server email address is rarely the same as your domain name. This creates a mismatch, adds points to the email score and can flag it as spam.

How do you fix this?

It’s usually a simple process to configure your site to send from a professional, business email address.

• For Zen Cart, go to Configuration>E-Mail Options> E-Mail Transport Method and select ‘smtpauth’. You’ll need to fill in the credentials for the email account you’ll be using.
  
• For WordPress, you’ll need a plugin. We like SMTP Mailer (https://wordpress.org/plugins/smtp-mailer/). It’s free, simple and light weight. Simply install it and configure it. You’ll need the credentials for the email account you’ll be using.
  

Having a business email address has other benefits as well, including:

• It creates a Professional Image. Business email addresses are more trustworthy and credible.
• It promotes Website visits. People who see your business name in your email address are more likely to visit your website. It makes it easy for them to see that you are a legitimate business.
• It builds your Brand. The more a reader sees the name of your business, the more they will recognize it, building your brand awareness.

Wheaton Website Services can help you set up a professional, business email address. We can help forward emails from an old address to the new one, if desired. We can advise you about creating email campaigns for your business that will avoid your recipients’ spam folders by avoiding the latest spam filter triggers. We look forward to working with you.

Contact us if you’d like us to configure this for you.