Understanding What Blacklisting Is,
How It Effects ​You, And How We Protect You!


Blacklisting is a term that is thrown around in the email marketing industry, we call it legal extortion!   There are hundreds of these blacklist companies out there and more and more popping up each day.   
What happens is a blacklist company will track IP's and Domains and place them on lists based on the senders IP and domain reputation score.  However, there is no central system monitoring these independent blacklist companies and most of them are automated.  They more times then not mistake good senders for bad.  

Yes, we have you covered...

*When mailing with us, blacklisting will not personally effect you or your company's IP's or Domains, all emails are being sent from our servers, IP's and Domains.

However, when you are put on a blacklist (depending on which one) it can severely effect your email deliverability.     

While email marketing is a vital part of marketing, there is a right way and a wrong way to send email campaigns.  

One of the reasons we are in this space is to help people reach the people they don't know.

Something that never made sense to us as business owners is why sending a direct mail piece, putting up a billboard, running a TV or radio ad all forms of acceptable marketing, but sending a commercial email with your offer to a targeted audience who very well need what you are offering considered taboo?  

In order for a business to survive, you must be able to reach the masses with your services or product.  

Is it is great to stay in contact with your exsisting customers, of course, but in order to grow you need to consistently reaching the people that don't know who you are.   

We specialize in the non-opt in emailing space (cold emailing) and that is why businesses and marketers flock to us.  We help you reach the people you don't know.  

However, sending to third party email list increases your chances of getting blacklisted tremendously.


There are a lot of moving parts to the puzzle in determining where your email will hit the inbox. Even if you do strictly follow email marketing best practices, you are at risk at having your email go into a spam/junk folder.  

Here are some common factors that will lead to blacklisting:

  • A sudden surge in email sending volume will trigger you to be placed on a blacklist. We suggest that you perform proper warm up for each mailer.  

  • High complaint of SPAM.  There is no way to stop the odd complaint, but if you go over the threshold ISPs may start routing your emails to spam folders or blocking your emails completely.

  • Poor email list hygiene can also land you on email blacklists. Sending messages to dormant or inactive email addresses that have been turned into recycled spam traps, or worse, emails addresses which are seeded from the actual blacklist companies, is detrimental to your sender reputation.

  • SPAM content. Certain words or phrases are triggered as spam keywords such as “free”or “Money back offer guaranteed”, as well as lots of different colors in the body text, CAPS LOCK, exclamation marks!!!!! etc. are all things that need to be avoided.

Our software will run spam keyword tests for all your email copy.  This will guide you and give you your spam rating.  If your spam score comes back above a 1.5 we suggest that you work on your content until you get it as close to that as possible. 

Sometimes, you have certain spam words that you just can't remove.  We suggest that you create an image with the text instead of straight text.  

Image: Image names effect spam score just as the text in the copy, so make sure to check your image names as well.  We suggest to keep all image names very shorty.

Example:

header.jpg, footer.jpg, leftside.jpg...etc 

Our system ensures you are practicing best practices when sending third party emailing, thus helping you with your email reputation and significantly reduce complaints by:

  • A forced unsubscribe link on all emails we send out
  • Automatically removing bad emails (bounces) and unsubscribes

Doing everything right still doesn't ensure your not going to get on a blacklist! 

The good news is that we have you covered!  

We perform daily checks blacklist checks and maintenance for each client.  When you get blacklisted, we will remove you from the blacklist and get you back up and running.  

Please note, that everything we do requires manual labor, and while some blacklists can remove in a matter of minutes, others require us to replace all IP's and domains.  What that means is we are basically setting up a complete new mailing system for you and that can take up to a day or so to complete.  

Also, you can perform your own email reputation management by using this basic monitoring tool to check if your domain is blacklisted - HERE. 


The key to building reputation is to be proactive and address any issues as quick as possible to show that we are serious about your reputation and about remedying your delivery challenges, ISP's love that!  

Bear in mind:
  • If you are constantly getting blacklisted, we will will find out the reason and work with you on trying to fix the situation.  9 out of 10 times it is the email list. 

There are a ton of blacklists in operation around the globe, including private managed blacklists (legal extortion). However, not all of them operate the same and some have more influence than others.

Here is a quick overview of some of the more prominent blacklists:
​
  1. Spamhaus 
  2. SURBL 
  3. Barracuda 
  4. Spamcop
  5. Invaluement (an example of a less effective blacklist that is now largely ignored by mail server admins).

Now that you know more about email blacklisting, you’ll agree that basic email reputation management is one you don’t want to neglect. Although we will always monitor this for you, and handle the delisting (when it happens), we can cannot stop ISPs from receiving negative responses from your recipients in your database.

It is up to you to maintain your brands reputation, and developing an effective marketing strategy on a foundation of email marketing best practices.