How do I prevent my newsletter from being considered spam?

With Laposta, you have an excellent sending medium. On the legal and technical side, we do everything we can to deliver your newsletter neatly to your contacts' inboxes.
Unfortunately, that does not guarantee that it will actually happen. The quality of your contact list(s), your subject line, and the content and design of your newsletter are also important. You are responsible for these parts yourself.

Based on a long list of criteria, spam filters assess whether your newsletter is classified as spam. Your newsletter scores points on each criterion; if you score too many points, your newsletter gets the classification spam.

Every provider and every spam filter uses a different algorithm. As a result, it can happen that a newsletter is blocked by one provider but not by another. Spam filters that are set too strictly often block newsletters incorrectly ('false positives').

In addition to spam filters, your contacts can also mark your newsletter as spam. This worsens your sending reputation and can cause spam filters to be set even more strictly. For your contacts, relevant content and the right frequency are especially important.

24 Tips to help prevent your newsletter from being seen as spam

First of all: to give the receiving party extra assurance about the sender and the content of your newsletter, and thus an extra reason to trust the email, it is important to authenticate your domain. This is good for the delivery of your newsletters ('deliverability').

In the tips below, we'll show you what else you can do in addition to that authentication. The guiding principle behind all these tips is: be honest, transparent, and careful. 'Don't act like a spammer, otherwise you'll be treated like a spammer.'

What you should definitely do

1. Send newsletters only to 'good contacts'

Legally, you may only send newsletters to existing customers and/or contacts who have given explicit prior consent for this.

2. Make sure you have a good subject line

Do not use unnecessary capital letters, spaces, or unusual characters. Don't overuse punctuation. Avoid spam-sensitive words such as free, discount, test, or benefit. Preferably do not start your subject with the word 'newsletter'; if you do want to include this word, it is better to start with other words instead. Also read our tips on writing a good subject line.

3. Use an email address from your organization as the sender address

Make it immediately clear who the newsletter is from. Therefore, send your newsletters from your own domain name and not from a private or webmail address.

4. Make sure the content is good

Make your newsletter interesting and varied. Avoid plain sales talk. Also read these tips: What are good topics for my newsletter.

5. Specify your message; if necessary, work with segments

Adapt the content of your newsletter to your different target groups. You can place those different target groups into segments and approach them in a targeted way. You can also use conditional content to offer your contacts only content that matches their wishes or interests.

6. Avoid spam-sensitive topics

Do not devote much or any attention to typical spam topics such as porn, viagra, drugs, casino, debt, medication, and medical treatments.

7. Include enough text in your newsletter

A low text/image ratio scores negatively with spam filters. The guideline is one paragraph of text per image. Never send only
images. Or, in proportion, images that are far too large. Of course, this also applies to images on which you have placed text because you thought that paragraph layout looked nicer; spam filters think differently about that.

8. Use 'normal' punctuation in your texts

Also in your newsletter, do not use unnecessary capital letters, spaces, punctuation marks, or unusual characters
Do not write: Come to the OPENING OF OUR NEW OFFICE!! Just like with the subject line of a newsletter, you don't want a newsletter full of unnecessary capital letters. That's exactly what spammers do.

9. Write correct Dutch

Do not make unnecessary language mistakes. Otherwise it will seem like an automatically generated and poorly translated text from a spammer. 

10. Personalize your newsletter

Place a personalized greeting at the top of your newsletter (Dear Jan, Dear Mr. Van Klink). That way, your contact can immediately see that this newsletter is really meant only for them, and you also vary your message in a massmail. In Laposta, you can easily personalize your newsletter by adding contact variables; here you can read how to personalize the content of your newsletter.

11. Refer to your own website

Always link to your own website in your newsletter. In this way, your contact gets confirmation that this newsletter is from you or your organization. Do not use literal links; read more about that here.

12. Include your contact details

Include your company details in your newsletter. Usually organizations do this at the bottom of the newsletter, in the so-called footer. Below that, you can place your text explaining how contacts can unsubscribe from your newsletter.

13. Ask contacts to add your sender address to their address book

If your contacts add your sender address to their address book, your newsletter will no longer end up in a spam folder for those contacts. It helps with recognition of your newsletter. Add this line at the top or bottom of your newsletter by default: 'Add info@mycompany.nl to your list of safe senders.'

14. Test your newsletter

Check whether and how your newsletter arrives in various email programs, especially Outlook, Hotmail, and Gmail. Note: if you test a newsletter with a sender address that is the same as the address (or the domain name in the address) receiving the test, there is a greater chance that your newsletter will be regarded as spam. If necessary, you can contact your own IT department to make an adjustment to your spam filter for this.

Don't do this (10)

Now that you know what you should do, we will also cover what you really should not do. These may seem obvious based on the list above, but we cannot emphasize this enough. 

15. Never send newsletters to 'bad contacts'

Stick to the law. Do not send newsletters to purchased or borrowed email addresses. Also do not collect email addresses via the internet ('scraping'). You simply may not send newsletters to these contacts with our program.  

16. Do not import severely outdated contact files

The vast majority of your contacts will have a new or different email address. Or may no longer be a real contact of yours at all. So do not use severely outdated contact files. Using them leads to a low acceptance rate and a high unsubscribe rate. That worsens your sending reputation.

17. Do not create new lists for every new newsletter

Prevent unsubscribed contacts and contacts that resulted in a hard bounce from accidentally receiving a newsletter again. Therefore, do not keep creating new lists to email those unsubscribers again. Do you want to update your contact list, for example because you want to automatically remove old customers from your list? Then empty your list and import your current contact file; the contacts who unsubscribed or resulted in a hard bounce will then remain saved and be excluded from sending. Read more about that here.

18. Do not send newsletters to dozens of email addresses from the same company

Do you want to send an internal newsletter? Then contact your IT department so the spam filter can be configured for this. If you send a newsletter to many contacts from the same company, with the same type of email address (containing the same domain name), spam filters may regard this as an 'overrun'. Maybe this company also works with general email addresses that let you reach multiple contacts?

19. Do not include a direct URL

Write in your newsletter: 'Visit our website' and place your link behind that. So do not use literal links, as you can also read here.

20. Do not place an extremely large image at the top of your newsletter

Take into account the amount of text in your newsletter. Make sure you have a good text/image ratio.

21. Never tamper with the unsubscribe link

Do not remove it. Do not make it smaller. Do not make it invisible. And do not place a hundred blank lines between your last line of text and the unsubscribe link. Did you know that unsubscribe link is actually very useful?

22. Do not add a disclaimer at the bottom of your newsletter

Do not say that your newsletter meets all spam requirements. This is something spam messages do instead.

23. Do not send too often and not too much

Make sure the frequency is right. Prevent your contacts from marking your newsletter as junk mail. Chances are you don't want a flood of newsletters yourself either.

24. Avoid careless use of html

Are you importing a newsletter or an html template yourself? Then really avoid careless use of html! Be careful with your html code and definitely do not use unnecessary tags.