Stop our emails ending up in spam...

Stop our emails ending up in spam...

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MysteryLemon

Original Poster:

4,968 posts

192 months

Thursday 2nd July 2015
quotequote all
Just wondering if anyone can offer me some advice?

Through work we often send out emails to customer who have dealt with us at our branches to approve artwork or to give out quotes etc. We do not send out advertising or any other kind of spam within these emails but more often than not, our emails will end up in the customers spam or junk inbox and we've found that most people don't even realise they have a spam or junk inbox, let alone check it on a regular basis...

So, is there anything we can do about this? It seems to be the big email providers that we have the most problems with. Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo etc. They all seem to have overactive spam filers and for some reason, our totally innocent emails get picked up as spam.

An example of one of our emails would be as follows :

Subject : Canvas Hut Order Preview
Content : Hi customer, thanks for uploading your image to us. We've taken a look at your file and the quality will be ok for printing from. There will be some cropping from the top and bottom of the image but nothing that takes away from the image as a while. The cost for your order will be £xx.xx with the total needing to be paid before we can print your order. Please give us a call on xxxxx xxxxxx to make payment or visit us at the branch where we can take payment and have the order ready within an hour. Thanks.

There will then usually be a simple jpg image attached (under 100kb).

So, what can we do to stop our emails going to spam inboxes? It's really bloody frustrating...

MysteryLemon

Original Poster:

4,968 posts

192 months

Thursday 2nd July 2015
quotequote all
Thanks for that.

Just ran a checker and our domain doesnt have SPF records... We're also listed on a couple of blacklists (although vast majority we are not).

Would no SPF record cause a lot of problems or will it more likely be the couple of blacklists causing the problems?

MysteryLemon

Original Poster:

4,968 posts

192 months

Thursday 2nd July 2015
quotequote all
Oh I've pretty sure we've come up against that a number of times already. Customers insisting they never received an email, nothing in spam etc. Yet we have it sat there in our sent box along with numerous follow up emails...

Zip is no issue for us but would be for a lot of our customers who likely pick up and review the emails on their phones and zip files aren't usually compatible without an app to open it.


MysteryLemon

Original Poster:

4,968 posts

192 months

Thursday 2nd July 2015
quotequote all
Some Gump said:
I'd proof read your copy / paste message as well.
I very quickly typed that out as a brief example, not a copy and paste from an actual email.

I apologise that it doesn't meet your standards.

MysteryLemon

Original Poster:

4,968 posts

192 months

Thursday 9th July 2015
quotequote all
Thanks for the advice and sorry for the late reply. Forgot I even started this topic.

A lot of the above suggested actions are out of my reach. Although we maintain the website ourselves (via a CMS), we don't host it ourselves or have any access to any of the server side stuff. We don't even have FTP access to the webspace so really restricted on what I can actually do.

We've got in touch with the service providers so hopefully it's something they will be able to sort for us without too much fuss...

We're also looking at linking the customer to an externally hosted image now rather than sending the Jpg directly and I've also applied to have us removed from the black lists we flag up on.

As a few people asked, we never send advertising directly. We use mailchimp for any marketing emails.

MysteryLemon

Original Poster:

4,968 posts

192 months

Thursday 9th July 2015
quotequote all
It's not Hi Customer but would be Hi Mr Smith or whatever their name is.

I do worry about linking to an online file for their preview as wouldn't that be flagged as spam?

MysteryLemon

Original Poster:

4,968 posts

192 months

Thursday 9th July 2015
quotequote all
Oakey said:
We've had the same issue. I've been toying with the idea of creating an online proofing system. Ie, I upload the file to our website, a unique url is generated, email that to the customer and then let them view proofs online maybe with some functionality to submit annotations / amendments.
Sounds like a great idea and something we have thought about but our current website simply doesn't support anything like that.

It would still involve an email to the customer though, which they probably wouldn't get rolleyes

MysteryLemon

Original Poster:

4,968 posts

192 months

Thursday 9th July 2015
quotequote all
andy-xr said:
It looks like some of the main Gotchas are sorted now

http://www.dnsinspect.com/canvashut.com/1436453303

Are you still having problems getting emails delivered? Is the mail server a shared hosted one at your domain registrars or somewhere else? You're with Heart Internet from the looks of it. Their support is very very good, ask them if they can help make email more deliverable for you
Won't know if we're still having problems until we hear from customers saying they haven't had emails through or we don't receive replies. Will have to give it a few days really.

All I know is that the website was created by a company called netbiz who manage all the hosting for use. We have no control over that. As we do is manage the content ourselves.

Looks like they may have acted on what we asked them to sort from that link. Thanks again for the help. I will report back soon.

MysteryLemon

Original Poster:

4,968 posts

192 months

Thursday 9th July 2015
quotequote all
I've never had any problem receiving emails from work emails, but I imagine it's because I quite often send emails backwards and forwards from them.

Seems to be random anyway. Some customers will have no issue, others will never see the emails, regardless which provider they are from. Who gets them and who doesn't has never been consistant.

We will just have to see how it goes really