Email campaign software is the first step to establishing yourself as a legitimate email marketer. This is because the use of campaign software is against spam philosophy since most spammers cannot afford to have a dedicated server with an IP address that will give away their identity. However, just having one of these is not enough. There are many practices that you must keep in mind when you are in the business of bulk email marketing. The basic thing that you have to avoid is being termed a spammer and to that end must be all your efforts.
The first thing that you must do is to ensure that you have a clean mailing list. A clean mailing list basically means that all of your subscribers must have opted in for receiving updates and email from you. While this may not exactly be a legal requirement, it is a logical one since mailing people without their permission will cause spam complaints against you. This will result in you ending up on a blacklist. From here the word will spread of other ISPs and spam filters. Therefore, stop things before they get out of hand and clean out your database.
Blacklisting is an especially bad thing that can end up happening to you. Organizations like Spamhaus are the guardians of regular email users against the onslaught of spam and email fraud. When one ISP blacklists you and you don't try to get yourself delisted and go to another ISP, you notch up one strike. Notch up three strikes and you make it to the Spamhaus Block List. This list is referred to by spam filters all over the world and if this happens, not even one email can end up getting out of the server.
This makes whitelisting a very important aspect in bulk email marketing. This is basically a list of bulk email marketers maintained by ISPs that allows those marketers to mail users en masse. Getting on this whitelist is therefore crucial to your marketing effort. This can be done by paying the ISP to be added on the email marketing whitelist or just sticking to proper rules of email marketing and not getting any spam complaints against you. Assuming that your email campaign software database has addresses using legal means, blacklisting is not something that you should really worry about.
Sending useful emails also improves your reputation. When people receive email, they prefer to like what they read and to that effect, you must ensure that the quality of content, topics, and copy are of the best quality. Do not make silly content errors that will just demean you as a sender of bulk emails.
Another important step is that you ask your recipients to add you to the safe senders list in their email clients. This can work in your favor because this will allow automatic download of any downloadable information that you code into your HTML emails for delivery.
