Spam Traps and How to Avoid Them
You send thousands of emails in your email marketing campaign. Does your every email reach the inbox of your target audience? Not. The statistics have shown that almost 20% of emails fail to land in a recipient's mailbox. Rather go into the spam folder. You put a lot of effort into growing your email list, have designed a beautiful marketing strategy, crafted an appealing subject line, created unique and interactive content, and design a visually appealing layout. After all the hard work, a major chunk of your audience does not receive your email. This is an alarming situation if you want to excel through your email marketing campaign.
Low deliverability is one of the critical challenges faced by email marketers. There can be many factors behind this, but the spam trap is the biggest cause of all the issues, often misunderstood. Let CBT mass email sender tell you what spam trap is.
What is a spam trap?
The mailbox providers use spam traps to ensure the security of the mailbox of their clients. This is done to catch the sender who sends malicious content. However, some fair marketers, due to some marketing techniques, also end up being caught in spam traps. A spam trap appears like an email address that belongs to no one. Have no existence. These are used to trap the people who don't follow the proper email list hygiene.
Spam traps are also known as fraud management tools, which the internet service providers use to make sure that the data of their client is safe and is not prone to any malicious content. If email senders get trapped in the spam alerts, they are blocked by the ISPs, and whenever they send email campaigns ever-after, their emails land in the spam folder of the recipient. These are also utilized to make sure that you take care of your email list hygiene. Because if you really take care of email hygiene, you must detect the presence of spam traps in your list as while opting-in, such emails don't respond.
The need of being aware of spam traps
You might be thinking that the need to be aware of spam traps in the email list. It might be possible that you own a spam trap in your list and sending emails to it. Even a single spam trap in the email list can considerably affect the deliverability of your emails in the mailbox of your recipient. Sending emails to spam traps puts a question mark on the health of your email marketing campaign. It indicates that you either have not built your email list through fair practices or don't clean your mailing list to maintain its quality. To the mailbox providers and ISPs, you appear as if some spammer is sending malicious content to their client. The ultimately impacts the reputation of the sender. The sender with a bad email reputation faces deliverability issues.
Damage caused by spam traps
The damage that a spam trap may cause to your email campaign varies and depends on the type of trap you faced, the frequency of hitting the spam trap, and how the spam detector handles the things at his end. However, some of the potential side-effects of spam trap are as under.
It costs you your sender reputation
It increases the bounce rate.
It decreases email deliverability.
Badly affect the reputation of IP, causing damage to other users also.
If you hit some trap laid by spam catching organization, you may fail to send emails to all clients.
Types of email spam traps
Depending upon the activity of the email sender, spam traps can be classified into the following types.
- Classic spam traps
- Seeded spam traps
- Typo domain-based spam traps
- Recycled email address spam traps.
Classic spam trap
Also known as pristine spam traps, they consist of email addresses that are inactive and not in use by any real human. As they are inactive emails, so they cannot be part of an email subscription list. If someone sends an email to such an email address, he will end up being blacklisted.
Seeded spam trap
Seeded spam traps contain invalid email addresses that are purposely placed in the online email resources to identify if someone usesan improper method to build an email list. Mostly the purchased email lists contain such hidden traps as they are created through scrapping.
Typo domain-based spam traps
This type of spam trap is used to identify the typo errors in the recipient mailbox provider's domain name, like Gmail instead of Gmail. This degrades the reputation of the sender and may mark as spam.
Recycled email address based spam traps
The spam traps occur when a sender sends emails to users who are since long ago, not active. This causes a high bounce rate.
- Having hard bounces can declare you to be not regulating the hygiene of your mailing list.
- How to prevent spam traps
- To ensure your email marketing campaign's success, you need to keep in mind the following points to keep yourself from being caught up in the spam trap.
- Never go for purchasing email lists. They not only are bad for engagement but also can lead you toa spam trap. Instead, build your opted-in mailing list.
- You can also validate the emails in your mailing list by using different services. This can help you verify each email address before adding it to the email list.
- Regularly check your email metrics like your email open rate, click rate, engagement, and conversion rate.
- Remove the emails that are not even opening your emails for a long time. Having inactive and non-engaging users can affect your performance metrics.
- Use the double opt-in method to confirm if your subscriber wants to receive emails from you.
- Remove the bounced emails from your contacts as this is not good for your email deliverability and the sender's reputation.
Final words
By making sure that you follow the above steps, you can get rid of your email spam trap andenhance the health of your email list.