Author: Abhijith VM

Getting blacklisted is the last thing a company wants to deal with while executing email marketing campaigns. Getting blacklisted prevents the messages or emails of your company from reaching the target audience, which reduces the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. To avoid such a situation, it is important to know about email blacklisting and ways to avoid getting blacklisted.  

What is an email blacklist?  

The purpose of an email blacklist is to barricade unreliable sources from sending spam content to tamper the inboxes. Email blacklisting is somewhat similar to blocking in social media – which means the blacklisted ones cannot reach out to you through the same email id or send any kind of content to you via email. In relation to the terms of the email, this barrier can harm the deliverability of your email.   

When email service providers suspect malicious or spam activities from one particular domain or IP, that IP gets added to the blacklist. This redirects irrelevant messages to a spam folder from the inbox of the receiver. Mainly there are 2 blacklists:  

1. IP address blacklist – When the sender is suspected of sending spam emails or other abusive emails, it gets blacklisted. 
2. Domain blacklist – This is a group of all domains that send spam and mislead users.  

Once an email address is blacklisted, such emails cannot fall into the primary inbox.   

How to find out if you’re on an email blacklist?  

There are many factors that can get you blacklisted. Below listed are some of such factors:  

• Spam complaints – The email service providers may trigger to blacklist the emails in case of a large number of spam complaints. 
• Email content – Certain email servers use the keyword to filter emails. Therefore, the use of phrases such as “Money-Back Guarantee”, “Free”, and the use of multiple exclamation marks, capital letters, etc. can blacklist your emails.  
• Poor email list management – Poor email list management can make the unsubscribe request go unnoticed. This may lead to sending emails to the recipients even after they unsubscribe, which in turn results in getting blacklisted or being tagged as spam.  

Similarly, there are some steps to follow to help you find out if you are on an email blacklist. Let’s go through the steps:  

1. Run Test – There are online tools that let you find out if your domain or IP has been added to any blacklists.  
   Such tools will ask you to send an email to their email id. They will analyze and let you know how spammy the email is, once they receive the email. You are required to make the suggested changes for better deliverability of your emails. 
2. Check through blacklists – If you find a low rate while tracking the engagement of the mails, you have to manually check different blacklists to find out the reason for the reduced rate of engagement. Since the blacklists are available for the public, you can check them through your own domain name. For this purpose, you can use certain websites including;  
   
   • Spamhaus  
   • Spamcop  
   • MXToolBox  
   • MultiRBL  
   • SURBL  
   • Invaluement  

If you are found to be blacklisted, you will need to confirm that you are not a spammer and request removal from the recipient. You will be taken out of the blacklist once they find your claim to be legit. This whole process requires about 24 hours.  

How to avoid being blacklisted?  

One of the possible things that you could do to avoid getting blacklisted while doing your email marketing is to ‘avoid being blacklisted’. Since we know that the primary causes of getting blacklisted are the content of emails and the lists, here are some ways to stay out of blacklists:  

Use double opt-in for the email subscribers

Double opt-ins ask the users to sign up for the mailing list where they need to do a two-step verification and then receive a confirmation email of their subscription with a link. This provides an extra security measure to barricade fake emails, thus make sure that the subscribers are real users and not bots. The extra signup step assures that your subscribers are interested in receiving your emails, when you create a newsletter, send promotional offers, or inform them about new offers.

This lessens the number of complaints about email spamming against your business and reduces the risk of people unsubscribing from your list of emails. Using double opt-ins will get you more qualified leads, establish stronger relationships with new subscribers, and enhances the delivery of your emails.  

Attach an unsubscribe link

Not including an unsubscribe link indicates a violation of anti-spam laws, and this can get your domain blacklisted. Adding an unsubscribe list not only keeps you adhered to the laws and regulations but also increases the experience of the subscribers. This ensures the emails are being sent to the interested subscribers only.

It is very important to be familiar with the anti-spam laws if you do not want your emails to get blacklisted. Moreover, displaying an unsubscribe link is way more important than anything else because the subscribers should feel the right to unsubscribe from any emails which they are not interested in.   

Clean the email lists routinely

Executing proper management of the email list and assessing it to detect latent spam traps can help avoid getting placed on a blacklist. It is better to update the email list by removing non-responsive subscribers to filter out spam traps. Checking the email address of the subscribers can help in avoiding junk like spelling errors and invalid email ids.

Email checker tools and email validation in sign-up forms can also prevent such errors. Keeping a healthy contact list may help in avoiding spam traps and increasing email deliverability.  

Optimize email content

Delivering email blasts and collective junk messages may lead to increasing complaints against your company and can also get your emails to the blacklist. You can personalize the email content by working with leading email marketing software. You can also customize using a drag and drop email editor to personalize the layout and design of the email, insert images, text, buttons, calendar invites, HTML snippets, and polls.

The advanced options allow you to include dynamic content and to exhibit different types of condition-based content such as a particular section or list. Customized content that can interest the subscribers will save your email from being flagged or blacklisted.  

Secure the server

To guard the email server against getting hijacked by bots and malware, it is essential to set up proper security measures and tools to verify IP addresses. These malicious programs can deliver hoax emails and blacklist you even if you follow appropriate methods of email marketing. You can use an IP search tool to determine if your IP address is being used by anyone else. Regularly updating the security protocols of the email server prevents blacklisting of your business emails and malware attacks.  

Avoid manual entry of email addresses into your database

Avoid manual addition of received contacts to your email list such as printed business cards, if they do not agree to receive your marketing emails. Instead, connect via their personal inbox and guide them to a specific form or landing page that allows you to select them to your email list. People who have not authorized you will often report your emails as spam and blacklist you.   

Conclusion  

As long as you are familiar with the elements that can lead you to get flagged as spam, you can avoid being on a blacklist. Ways to not get blacklisted vary from industry to industry, and you may need to update yourself according to the changes in the email delivery rules. Blacklists do not aim to make your life more difficult but to make sure that nothing goes wrong when you send emails to people. So, be certain in facilitating valuable and healthy content to your subscribers, which is the best way to avoid getting blacklisted.   

UTM parameters are widely used in the world of digital marketing for tagging a URL and understanding the source of the traffic to that URL.

Adding UTM codes to the email link not only analyzes the potency of your marketing campaigns but also measures where the traffic to your website comes from. But how can we evaluate the effectiveness of email marketing? That’s why we need to discuss how UTM codes are added to URLs to track their effectiveness. 

What are UTM codes? 

UTM codes, also known as UTM parameters, allow webmasters to identify the source of web traffic, which ultimately leads to monitor the success of different marketing strategies such as email campaigns, Facebook campaigns, or any other online marketing campaigns.  

The term UTM stands for “Urchin Tracking Module”, and it was introduced by Urchin Software Corporation, which was taken into possession by Google in 2005. The UTM code is a short text that can be attached to webpage URLs. It sends additional information about each link to Google Analytics, and it usually contains information about the origin of the traffic to the website. 

For instance, let’s assume that your sales get a shoot up in a month but you do not have the slightest idea about how the traffic of your site has increased, what content or which medium has contributed to the increase in traffic and thereby sales. Google analytics can shed some light on this scenario, but to dig down deeper into the campaign-level data, you’ll need UTM tagging. Not having UTM tagged URLs in a campaign makes it difficult to repeat the success of a specific campaign. which means you might be wasting some valuable resources. 

How to set up UTM code in your email campaigns? 

A well-setup UTM link in email campaigns should tell you the source of the web traffic, how and why the traffic comes to the website. Common UTM parameters include: 

• Campaign name – to identify the name of the campaign.                  
• Medium – to track the campaign medium that is the email, organic, social, or CPC (cost per click). 
• Source – to identify the source of the campaign which includes a newsletter name or email. 
• Content – to identify the content of the campaign in order to distinguish between multiple ads in a campaign.  
• Campaign term – to identify the term or keyword used to search.

The easiest and the best way to create a UTM code is Google’s URL builder which is convenient for beginners.  

This is how a URL builder looks like once you fill the required fields:

Here is what a URL looks like after UTM tagging:

Once the link is generated, you can copy the whole link and use it in your email campaign. When the user clicks on the link containing UTM code, it facilitates Google Analytics to track the particular channels, campaign ID, sources, content, or campaign terms the customers use to visit your website.  

How to track Emails Marketing Effectiveness with UTM codes? 

After building up the email marketing campaign, one can begin adding UTM. Once you start adding UTM codes to email marketing campaign links and distribute them to your customers, you can also track emails in detail at the level of individual links.  

If you are using Google Analytics then it will provide reports containing UTM data. To view the reports: 

• Navigate to Acquisition in the Google Analytics dashboard 
• Then go to All Traffics. 
• Select Channels under All Traffics. 
• Select Campaigns and go to All Campaigns. 

This helps you to measure what content, campaigns, and email sources are creating more traffic in the website.  

It is very much necessary to track the traffic to the website not just to understand the readers of your material but also to analyze what needs to be changed or fixed along the way.  

Wrap up 

Irrespective of the size of your business, email tracking is a good practice that every business should follow. When you run email campaigns, you should be able to measure how well they work.

This allows you to enhance your future email marketing campaign because email tracking gives you good acumen about what works and what doesn’t.

Furthermore, using UTM parameters for email tracking takes it to another level, providing you with a wide array of detailed information. 

To conclude, using UTM in email marketing enables you to improve marketing campaigns and to focus on spending time and money on the most effective strategy.  

In the era of rapid digitization, marketing through emails is considered one of the major pillars for any good client recruitment strategy. And this has been the case for quite some time now – ever since its inception in the late 1970s, email marketing tactics have achieved great popularity and traction among firms worldwide. Although spam emails and undesired subscriptions continue to plague customers, a well-deployed email marketing campaign still bears fruits for business.

Email marketing plays a significant role in generating short-term revenue for clientele. And the discipline involves a range of metrics and terminologies that can help streamline this revenue into the long term. In fact, the average return on the interest generated by emails over the last decade was reported to be upwards of 3,800% for every mail sent, which further cements its value within business marketing.

But how does one keep track of these benefits? How does one efficiently gauge whether their strategy is working? In order to correctly answer these questions, we must first understand the different metrics used to track email marketing campaigns.

The 10 Metrics Everyone Doing Email Marketing Must Know

Open Rate

Email Open Rate is quite self-explanatory – it describes the percentage of individuals who have opened your email out of the total number of emails sent. These subscribers will only need to click on the email for this metric to be valid. The open rate can be used to gauge the fractions of your potential clients that may be interested in your offer but need yet to be pursued.

Click-through Rate (CTR)

This is possibly one of the most widely used email marketing metrics. It describes the percentage of individuals who have clicked on at least one link attached to your email out of the total number of emails delivered. A common mistake when calculating this metric is taking the total number of emails as opened emails instead of just delivered ones. This can be used to estimate the fraction of your clientele that is interested in your offer but have yet to convert.

Conversion Rate

Conversions describe the individuals who have turned over into clients by following through with your CTA. This could be new sign-ups, new subscriptions, submitting feedback, etc. The percentage of individuals who have successfully responded to your CTA out of the total emails delivered describes the email conversion rate. Typically, these conversions can be used to compare the total leads generated in one campaign compared to another.

Bounce Rate

Bouncing emails is a phenomenon where the sent email is not received by the subscriber either due to a faulty email address or because of being returned by the recipient server (hence, “bounce” rate). The percentage of mails returned out of the total sent describes the email bounce rate. Campaigns that register a high bounce rate will need to reevaluate their structure and ensure that their strategy is not misinformed.

 Click-to-Open Rate (CTOR)

This metric is used to determine how well the actual content of the email has performed. Furthermore, it describes how effective specific emails are in a given demographic in terms of email message, design of content, and generating client interest. The percentage of emails that have generated a unique action by the client (such as clicking on a link) out of the total emails opened (not just delivered) describes the CTOR.

Number of Unsubscribes

This is yet another self-explanatory metric. It simply describes the number of individuals who have opted not to receive any further emails from your firm out of the total number of current subscribers. This may be due to the content of your email, the frequency of your emails, the incompatibility of your emails to your demographic, and so on.

Overall ROI

Return on Interest in an email campaign is used to quantify the effectiveness of the campaign in terms of profitability. This is determined as the percentage of money returned (the difference between the total spent for the campaign and revenue generated) from the total amount spent during the whole campaign. This metric is important to compare the overall worth of one campaign compared to another in order to gain the best bank for the buck.

Subscriber Retention Rate

This defines the fraction of individuals who have chosen to continue receiving emails from your firm. It is described as the percentage of remaining subscribers (after reducing bounces and unsubscribes) from your initial total number of subscribers. This metric describes both the ability of your emails to deliver information without getting monotonous and the effectiveness of your message within your chosen demographic.

Revenue per Email

RPE determines the profitability of individual emails in your marketing campaign. It is described as the fraction of total revenue generated during the campaign out of the total number of emails received by clients (not necessarily opened). Unlike ROI, RPE takes into consideration the performance of only a single mail-in generating profit. This will help determine the capacity of your mail content to generate hot leads and stable conversions.

Spam Complaint Rate

This metric describes the efficiency of the overall campaign in terms of email content and the frequency of sent emails. It is determined as the fraction of emails reported as spam to the total emails sent.  A typical or ideal spam rate should be less than 0.1% (or 1 spam report out of every 1000 emails sent). Anything more would be the reason for you to reevaluate the specifics of your mails (content, sent frequency, etc.)

In Conclusion

Understanding the metrics above is just the beginning. It is also important to learn the value of these metrics to your campaign specifically, which will only come from experience. These metrics will ensure that your campaign is headed in the right direction, which, in turn, is important to preserve funds, if not generate revenue. So, remember to use these metrics to the best of your advantage, carefully track the nature of your campaign, and make sure that you’re updated with the progress of your current campaign compared to your last.