Email Blacklist: How to Get Off It (By Avoiding It In The First Place)
By cchi@hubspot.com (Clifford Chi)
![→ Download Now: The Beginner's Guide to Email Marketing [Free Ebook]](https://no-cache.hubspot.com/cta/default/53/53e8428a-29a5-4225-a6ea-bca8ef991c19.png)
In the email marketing industry, sending spam or unsolicited bulk messaging can taint any organization’s brand. It can prompt mailbox providers to filter their messages to the spam folder or place them on an email blacklist.
In this article, we’re going to explain what an email blacklist is, how to avoid getting placed on one, and how to tell if you’ve been blacklisted.
How to Avoid an Email Blacklist
How to Check if You’re On an Email Blacklist
How to Get Off an Email Blacklist
Some blacklists, like Spamhaus, are credible and widely trusted, so if a brand is on one of these blacklists, it’ll heavily impact their sender reputation. Other blacklists, likeNoSolicitado, are less credible and trusted, so if a brand is on one of these blacklists, it won’t affect its sender reputation nearly as much.
When referencing blacklists to determine a brand’s deliverability, mailbox providers weigh their influence by credibility and not just if they’re listed on them.
How to Avoid an Email Blacklist
A wise email team leader at HubSpot named Jess Swazey once told me, “The easiest way to get off an email blacklist is to never get on it in the first place.” In light of this Yoda-esque wisdom, here are four best practices for avoiding email blacklists.
1. Only email contacts who have subscribed to your email program — and never email contacts scraped from websites, third-party sources, or purchased contact lists.
The easiest and most crucial step you can take to avoid email blacklists is emailing people who actually subscribed to your emails. Because in a world where only 8% of people assume the information in advertising is true, the best way to build a contact database is the hard and honest way — collecting email addresses organically.
Plus collecting and emailing contacts who never subscribed to your email program in the first place is a one-way ticket to getting blacklisted. This is because most blacklist operators have already placed pristine spam traps in third-party sources, abandoned websites, and purchased contact lists.
2. Clean your email lists on a regular basis.
Having a large email list may seem like a great idea, but they do more harm than good if they consist of numerous unengaged contacts, so it’s best to go through your email list and purge it of any inactive email addresses.
Most mailbox providers decide if you’re actually a reputable sender and deserving of a high deliverability score by keeping an eye on any inactive email addresses that have been converted into recycled spam traps and dinging any IP address or domain that sends emails to them. In your database, any contact that hasn’t engaged with your email program or opened one of …read more
Source:: HubSpot Blog
