Marketing email going into spam

Samantha Robertson

We are experimenting with sending emails from the marketing section of NXT. Unfortunately, our emails are going into spam! Our IT person is working on the DKIM and SPF best practices per blackbaud's suggestion. But is there anything else we can be doing? It's being sent from an email address that's frequently used for our communications "advancement@...." 

Chris Martin

Hi Samantha Robertson‍. Getting your SPF and DKIM records set up properly are probably the most important things you can do to lessen the likelihood of your messages being judged by inbox providers to be SPAM. They are the mechanism by which you tell the mailbox providers of the world that when you use Blackbaud software to send emails, that this mail is legitimate and that you've authorized Blackbaud and our mail infrastructure to send this mail at your direction.


The next best thing that helps maximize the chances of your mail landing in inboxes is for your recipients to engage with your emails. All of the major inbox providers have made it very clear that they are working really hard to ensure that only "wanted" mail reaches their customers' inboxes. So they look at things like the rate at which their customers either ignore your mail altogether...or worse mark it as spam. Those things increase the likelihood of your email being routed to a spam folder.


Conversely, the greater the percentage of your recipients that actively engage with your emails (open them, spend time reading them, click links, etc.), the greater the likelihood the mailbox providers judges your mail to be "wanted" and to route it to inboxes.


Hopefully that helps!


Thanks,

Chris Martin

Blackbaud Product Management

Samantha Robertson

That's helpful. Thanks Chris!

Phillip Bicknell

ISPs also keep on some defunct email accounts as Spam traps, so it's important you stop emailing supporters who haven't engaged for, say, a year. Only send again if they organically re-engage.


And for some ISP domains, it's important to also have DMARC sorted on your sender domain - we had one supporter query it, so have set it up in January and will be reviewing in April.


And in your initial marketing email to supporters ask them to add your sender address to their contacts.