Avoiding Blacklisting: Making Sure Your Email Gets Through

All of us know that email marketing is probably today’s most famous method to advertise a product or service. Whether we asked for the contact or not, our email inboxes are filled with messages from individuals everyday who want our business. Email is today’s biggest communication factor, but why shouldn’t it be? That’s because it’s free to use and delivers instantaneously.

However there is one problem with email advertising that you may not think of very often: blacklisting. Your domain name or ISP will be blacklisted with just one complaint. If you are on the blacklist, all your emails will not getting through and neither is your advertising message.

So how big of a problem is this? Well, AOL which is one of the world’s biggest Internet Service providers, blocked a whopping 80% of messages to its subscribers due to blacklisting. The blacklisting can happen easily because it takes just one person who forgets that they signed up for your email newsletter and decides to complain even though your email could be the most legitimate message ever sent.  So what’s the negative effect from the blacklisting? The negative effect from blacklisting is slump in sales volume, which can be devastating for your business.

So how do you define a blacklist?  A blacklist is a database of known internet addresses (or IPs) that contains lists of sender domains and IP addresses of known and suspected spammers. Various Internet Service Providers (ISP) and bandwidth providers subscribe to these blacklist databases in order to filter out spam sent across their network or to their subscribers. Companies like AOL, MSN, and Yahoo all have very strict policies on spam, so many well-intended, legitimate emails never get through.

So how can you be sure you haven’t been blacklisted? Unfortunately, you really can’t be 100% sure.  You may be on someone’s black list and not even know it, and be added to and removed from black lists at the drop of a hat.  The only way to prevent being blacklisted unfairly is to use today’s technology to keep track of it all.  There is cutting-edge software technology available that checks all the major black lists like Spamcop, DNSBL, and SPAMHaus to ensure your domain or ISP hasn’t been added.

Taking a few moments to understand and solve your potential blacklisting problem can mean a world of difference in your bottom line.

If you have any questions regarding blacklisting or facing this issue at this moment, please feel free to reach out to us at ServerFreak for assistance.