Avoiding Getting Your Email Address Labeled as Spam

[ProjectLabs]

If you send out a lot of email outreach (manually not automated), are there ways to avoid getting labeled as spam and having your emails filtered to the spam box by the major email providers? (or are you pretty safe if you personalizing each email manually and getting a decent  number of replies).

[Highland]

A lot of spam filtering seems to have gone social. Not like Facebook social, but rather, providers looking at spam reports. Gmail, for instance, looks at spam reports and learns from that. Yahoo doesn't allow direct spam reports, they just say to report spam to your provider and they'll get it that way (not helpful if you run your own email server).

It's important to remember that the Spam button has become the new unsubscribe button. Users don't have to click any strange links and hope that they're legitimate, they just flag it as spam and it goes away. We had horrible results with some of our early email marketing because large amounts of people were marking our email as spam (one provider dropped us entirely).

So what makes me open an email?

Keep your subject clear and concise. Personalizing helps some but many people have those coming in anyways. I want to know why you've sent me an email. Make it look nice. Most spammers won't try to make nice emails. Done properly it will grab attention. Also, avoid images. Most email clients will filter them out and ask users if they want to see them (hint: the answer is usually no). Last but not least, be sure to use a properly configured email server and be sure your domain has a SPF DNS record and/or DKIM. SPF in particular is easy enough to use, it just lets people know what servers are authorized to send email for your domain.