Ever had someone tell you they never received your email?

You know you sent it. But they don’t have it.

So what do you do?

You tell them to check their spam folder.

And, many times, that’s just where it is.

It’s not their fault. It’s just that their email filter system thought perhaps the email was spam.

So you have to come up with a way to prevent your clients’ email application from marking your messages as spam. How do you do that? You use a technique called whitelisting.

But before we talk about that, let’s discuss how your email application decides a message is spam.

Email Spam filters

In the old days, pretty much every email anyone sent you was delivered to your inbox. That meant you were more likely to get spam.

In an effort to prevent users from getting spam, email systems began developing filtering systems. These filters checked every incoming email and tried to identify ones that might be spam.

Over the years, these filters became more and more powerful and have become a great way to help keep your inbox safe from spam.

But there’s a problem: filtering systems aren’t 100% foolproof. That’s because they are automatic—they rely on a set of rules that help identify what MIGHT be spam, but they can’t be completely certain.

Those rules might include the following.

Is the email from a known “bad” source? If so, mark as spam.
Is the email from an address you have never been in contact with before? If so, mark as possible spam.
Does the subject line include the word money? If so, mark as possible spam.

In reality, your email software uses several rules to decide if a message is spam. The more of these rules a messages breaks, the greater the chance it will be marked as spam.

Although the filtering system attempts to flag emails that appear to be spam, it’s not at all unusual for legitimate emails to get tagged as spam.

Let’s say you are a business, and someone comes into your store to make a purchase. At the cash, you ask if they would like to be added to your email list. They say yes, and tell you their email address.

Let’s further say that the first email you send them has the following subject line.

Save money today! Spring Sale now on.

The first time you email them, their email system will notice that you are a brand new contact. Strike one—spam filters are suspicious of emails from brand new sources.

Your subject line mentions the word money. Strike two— spammers are often trying to sell something and will frequently use words such as money or win in their subject lines. (However, spammers got smart and stopped using such words in their subject lines in an attempt to bypass the spam filters, so email spam filters nowadays are worrying less about such words.)

Let’s say that the text in your email uses “spammy language”. Examples: “Buy before November 12 and I will give you a $100 refund.” Strike three—sounds ok, but again, many spammers try to entice people by saying they will give them money, so the filters get suspicious.

Those are just some of the “red flags” that spam filters use. But those same rules that are meant to protect us from unwanted emails can also send legitimate messages to your spam folder.

That’s one of the reasons those emails are put in a folder instead of just being deleted. That way at least you can check the folder to see if any of the emails flagged as spam are actually ones you want to be receiving. But how many of us check our spam folder on a regular basis?

The problem for you as a business owner is how to prevent the emails you send out to your list from being put in their spam folder. One of the most commonly used techniques for that is whitelisting.

What’s whitelisting?

The easiest way to understand what whitelisting is, is to compare it to its opposite: blacklisting.

·         A blacklist is a list of people that you don’t want to associate/work with.
·         A whitelist is a list of people you DO want to associate/work with.

More accurately for our purposes in this article, it’s a list of email addresses that your customer/client/newsletter subscriber wants to accept mail from. And you want to make sure that your email address is on that list. Otherwise the emails you send might go directly to their spam folder.

And that, of course, is not what you want to happen.

How do you whitelist an email address?

To whitelist an email address, the recipient has to flag it as being safe. This ensures that all future emails from that address are not flagged as spam and are delivered to the inbox, not the spam folder.

The steps the user has to take to whitelist an email address varies from email platform to email platform.

As an example, here’s how it’s done in Gmail:

-          Open the email
-          Hover over the sender’s email address (near top left of email, yellow arrow in image below)
-          A box appears
-          Click on the Add Contact icon (top right of box, red arrow in image below)

That adds the email address to your contact list. Emails from anyone you have added as a contact are automatically considered safe, i.e. whitelisted.

Whitelist requests

Often, when you first sign up to be on someone’s email list, especially one that operates largely online, one of the first emails you get will be what we call a welcome email. In this email, it is common for the writer to ask you to whitelist their email address.

A typical email goes something like this.

Hi!

I’m so happy to have you in the Financial Focus Community! I know you are going to learn so much, not just from me, but from all the others members who have also joined.

Here are the next steps for you to take, to get the most out of your registration.

1. Whitelist my email address.

2. Join the Financial Focus Facebook group.

etc.

The problem with whitelisting

The problem with asking people to add you to their whitelist is that most won’t know what you mean. They also likely don’t know how to do it.

So emails asking people to add them to their whitelist often include instructions on how to do that. But those emails can be long, and they need to explain how to do it in several different email systems (because not everyone uses i.e. Gmail).

And even if they do know how to do it, there’s a good chance they just won’t bother.

But there is an alternative way.

Rather than asking people to whitelist your email address, ask them to reply to your email. Once they reply, their email system usually then automatically adds that address to their safe list.

So simply by replying to your email, a user can get your address whitelisted. And they don’t have to worry about how to manually add you.

The trick, of course, is finding a way to make sure they do, in fact, reply. You also need to make sure they get the email in the first place, so they have something to reply to (because your first email might end up in their spam folder!).

We’ll talk about that in next week’s article.

Until then...

Cheers,

Tim

Helping you engineer the business of you

Whitelisting: How to make sure your clients receive your emails—Part 1