Hi Heather,

In our last email, we alerted you to the changing requirements for delivery of bulk emails into Gmail and Yahoo! inboxes.  Part of the change requires that less than 0.3% of your emails are marked as spam - that's where the recipient clicks the "Spam" button provided by some email clients, like Gmail.

As a user of Enudge you will have followed the Australian Spam Act and obtained consent prior to sending to your contacts.  So being penalised because people decide to click the spam button, when you have followed the law, is frustrating.

Here's a list of ideas for helping reduce the likelihood that people will wrongfully mark your emails as spam:

• Relevance. Ensuring that your emails are sent to the appropriate cohort within your list, and that the content is highly relevant for the audience, will go a long way to reducing the likelihood that a person marks your email as spam.  Enudge allows you to assign unlimited categories to your contacts, which can help you to select just the right group of people to receive each message.
• Easy to Unsubscribe. It's a requirement of the Spam Act that you make it easy for people to unsubscribe from receiving your emails. Enudge does that for you, via the automated unsubscribe link in the footer. However, including the unsubscribe link in the body of your email is also a good idea (see the Personalisations fields drop down for this code).
• Easy to Skim. Like it or not, people often skim read emails, at least the first time they read a message. Using headings, images and other design elements, to neatly layout your email, will greatly help the reader to find out what your key messages are, and decide whether they need to read it in detail later. In our opinion, it's okay if your recipients aren't reading every word of your emails ... if there is something super important for them in your email, they are likely to flag it and address it later.
  But regardless, the fact that they opened and skim read your email reminds them that you exist and reminds them about what you do!  Email marketing remains the most cost effective digital marketing available.
• Uncontentious. Unfortunately, including contentious / inflammatory topics in your emails makes them more likely to be marked as spam. People might do this out of spite because they don't agree with your take on a particular topic. If you need to talk about a contentious issue, consider doing that on a web page which the reader gets to by clicking instead of inside the body of your email.
• Obviously from you. Humans use pattern matching all the time to deal with the vast amount of information coming at them on a daily basis. They get used to the way your emails look - the sender name, your logo, the way your email is laid out, and more. If you suddenly send an email that is completely different, they may think it isn't really you, and therefore spam.  Obviously you will change the look of your emails from time to time, but consider doing this gradually, and not changing everyone at once.
• Not Too Frequent. What is too frequent for one person may be considered infrequent for another, so this is quite subjective. From time to time, asking your audience about how often they would like to hear from you can provide insights. The Enudge survey tool, built into your Enudge account, might help you to ask the question. Also, you might consider setting up different categories for your contacts which specify the frequency of sends e.g. weekly updates, monthly newsletter.
  Enudge allows you to specify which categories can been by your contacts (public categories) when they are updating their preferences. For help with this feature: Self Service Management of Preferences.
• Mobile Responsive. Much email is read on mobile devices. If your email doesn't have a larger font, and narrower images on mobile, i.e. it isn't 'mobile responsive' you may frustrate your reader.  All the inbuilt email templates for Enudge are mobile responsive.

Have other ideas about reducing the likelihood of your emails being marked as 'spam'?  Share your ideas via our Facebook page.

Recent Enhancements

We are constantly working on improvements to Enudge, including the following more recent additions:

1. Timeout of the Enudge session has been extended in light of the introduction of multi-factor authentication, so you should have fewer requirements to sign in again when you go off to get a coffee :-).
2. Downloading Bounces from Email Campaigns now includes the bounce code and bounce description in the CSV file.
3. 5.7.x bounce codes are now hard-bounced.  Historically, these were ignored, because it appeared that such emails were actually delivered; that is no longer the case, so affected email addresses will now appear in your bounces.

Please feel free to send us your suggestions for improvements to Enudge.

Happy Enudging!
Enudge Team