Spam Checker: Email Scoring

First, let’s understand what is scoring?

Scoring is mainly used in the banking sector to analyze the creditworthiness of a borrower. But it is also used in marketing.

For an explanation of the term “scoring in marketing” I turned to Google. With a cursory review, I did not find really authoritative sources that I would like to refer to. There is no such term in Russian Wikipedia either. Therefore, for a general understanding, I suggest you read the Lead scoring article in the English Wikipedia.

Now I want to talk about scoring for your e-mail newsletter. Those. Your particular letter is assigned points from 1 to 10, where 1 means “very bad, spam letter”, and 10 means very good, and you can send mailing with peace of mind. The chances of your letter getting into spam in the latter case are almost zero. With exceptions which I will describe below.

Case: Scoring for email newsletters

Background: There is a base of potential Clients (it so happened that exactly 100 people). Everyone needs to be notified that a new product has appeared that they were previously interested in. The mailing was carried out on Tuesday, at 18.00 Kyiv time. The audience was from different countries, so this time was considered optimal in terms of Europe / America. I used the mailing service: UniSender.com.

Newsletter analysis:

1. 95 out of 100 letters were delivered. Of these, only 1 letter ended up in spam.
2. The letter was opened and read by 32 people, which is 23%. The average email open rate in Business & Finance is 16% (data from MailChimp).
3. The number of leads is 3.

Conclusions from the analysis:

Business and finance is a very general topic. All business spam gets there from conferences to office cleaning. We have a very narrow niche, so 3% of leads is unsatisfactory. The goal is at least 5%.

In addition, the mailing list was carried out according to the list of those who were interested in the product in the past and from our company, so the percentage should be even higher, especially for reads.

Why didn’t someone who was clearly interested in the product even open the email with our subject line? Still need to think where to improve. Perhaps a lot of emails ended up in spam?

Task: Find spam filters and check how many points for each parameter are scored for our letter in different spam identification algorithms.

Use the mail-tester.com service.

The bottom line is this: you send your letter to this service at the proposed address, and then enter your e-mail address from which the mailing was sent in the field and get the scoring result – points from 1 to 10.

My score was 9 out of 10.

In the service you can see what is important for spam filters, how to improve your letter and much more. A very handy tool.

About blacklists. I was given information that ip is listed in SORBS-SPAM. To do this, I went to the service itself and checked the ip manually, to which I was told that the ip was not on the black list.

But still, according to UniSender 1, the letter ended up in spam despite the fact that everything looks perfect! Why?

I asked this question on the UniSender Fb page. To which I received a reasonable response:

Conclusions:

1. You still need to do scoring of your e-mail newsletter, because. it shows not only the spam nature of the letter, but also problems with ip, readability, and so on.

2. Anyway, you are never 100% protected from getting into spam. If you have a low percentage of open letters, maybe there is a problem with the header and you should have done a split test? And what does the announcement of the above letter look like?

3. Either way, write interesting content. The era of quality content for the Client has come.