How to protect your email campaign from spam traps
Email service providers and blocklist providers use spam traps to catch malicious email senders. Still, somewhat it includes the legitimate senders with poor email list hygiene or poor inquiry practice to consider the validity of an email address before adding it to one's mailing list.
A spam trap seems like an actual email address, but a real person does not own it, nor does it have any communication usage. They are the traps that are designed to catch the spammers. Its sole purpose is to recognize spammers and email senders that are not implementing email list hygiene practices properly.
How Spam Traps can harm your Sender Reputation
These Spam traps are harmful to our email senders, and bounce rate, or invalid email addresses, negatively impactthe email sender's reputation. Consequently, your internet service provider can deny and deteriorate your IP address or domain.
To know more about spam traps, let's learn about the kinds of spam traps, their details, and how you can avoid them.
Types of spam traps
These are the three kinds of email spam traps:
Pristine spam trap
Pristine spam traps are email addresses generated by internet service providers and other trapping organizations. These email addresses are never used before by any sender.
The email addresses are rooted in different websites, and when spammers fix websites to develop there are also often present in purchased lists.
If an ISP grasps somebody directing to a pristine spam trap, it reveals that this sender is involved in some suspicious methods to grow its contact list.
Other spam traps harm your list or last a negative impact on your sender reputation, while a pristine spam trap is highly dangerous as it can deteriorate your domain or IP address.
Recycled spam trap
Recycled spam traps are registered domains or email addresses valid in the past, but later, they have been allocated for trapping spam. Some of the common examples are role addresses like sales@, support@, info@, or email addresses of the companies' ex-employees.
The recycled spam traps are usually not as destructive as the pristine spam trap but can damage or deny your sending reputation by the time.
Invalid Email addresses
Emails with some usual typos in email service providers like "Yaho" instead of 'Yahoo" and "gnail" instead of "gmail" are also be recycled as spam traps. This is often an unintentional typing mistake that a visitor commits at the time of fulfilling the subscription form, or they could be in a hurry to crosscheck, but this can lead to a spam trap and can harm your sender's reputation. So you must crosscheck every email address before entering it into your email contact list and check if the domain address is valid or not. Some fake email addresses are also sold to you by the agency you contact for purchasing email addresses list. And by the time you could analyze that those addresses were fake, it gets too late.
How to prevent a Spam Trap from entering the Mailing List
There are no hard and fast rules, but some trial and tested methods to avoid your email contact list get contaminated by spam traps. You have to regularly follow your email campaign data and look closely at an alarming email address present here. List hygiene is a vital part of the mailing list.
You can follow these tactics to prevent spam traps from getting entered into your mailing list.
Mailing List compilation
When compiling your email contact list for marketing campaigns, you should be more than active to sense the invalid email addresses to get added to your mailing list.
At the time of subscription, website visitors or social media audiences may fill the wrong email addresses in the subscription forms or forget to crosscheck it.
But you should verify the validity and activeness of each email address that you are going to add to your email contact list.
Try double opt-in forms
Try double opt-in forms as subscription forms. Here you would send your new subscribers a confirmation email from your side to get confirmed by the subscribers, right after they have fulfilled your subscription form. After clicking the confirmation link, they would be able to join your mailing list.
Purchasing email contact list
Just because it takes time to grow a good mailing list doesn't mean that you should purchase it from some great companies. They would sell you outdated email addresses, uninterested leads, fake email addresses, invalid email addresses, and emails with typos. You can't check the quality at that time, and by the time when you will know the truth, it would have destroyed your senders' reputation.
Outdated emails
Another effective strategy to avoid spam traps is maintaining your list up-to-date with subscribers who are actively engaging with your email content. Spam traps are often generated from outdated email addresses that are no longer active or valid. Not sending emails to addresses for a long time, or not following up the email metrics later, and not analyzing the email addresses that have not opened your emails for months; can seriously hit your email list hygiene.
You should think about removing them from your mailing list, as they are no more significant for you. But you can give them one more chance by sending them a re-engagement email campaign that purposely asked them about the reason for not connecting with your brand for a while or ask for their feedback to improve your email campaigns that they find working for them.
Tips for dealing with your current subscriber's mailing list
Here are some tips for you to manage your existing mailing list:
- Deactivate bounced email addresses
Always consider the bounce notifications and get active to check them. Ensure the removal of invalid email addresses from your active email contact list s they can soon turn into spam traps. Add invalid addresses to a block list to ensure that you don't reacquire the same email address again into your mailing list. - Focus on your inactive subscribers
Inactive subscribers aren't useful for your campaigns, and many of them would be in danger of converting into dead addresses or recycled as spam traps. If you feel those email addresses are still valid, then send them a re-engagement email campaign. But if they don't respond, then you better eliminate those useless email addresses from your contact list without giving it a second thought.
To avert spam traps, frequently clean your mailing list.