Summary
Unprofessional email marketing tactics can severely damage sender reputation and lead to messages being marked as spam or blocked entirely. These tactics often involve ignoring fundamental deliverability best practices and a lack of respect for recipient consent. Understanding what constitutes unprofessional behavior and how to appropriately respond to spam is crucial for maintaining a healthy email program.
Key findings
- List acquisition: Harvesting email addresses from professional networks like LinkedIn is a highly unprofessional and illicit practice that guarantees negative deliverability outcomes and potential legal repercussions. This method bypasses consent, leading to high complaint rates.
- Irrelevant content: Sending content that is completely unrelated to the recipient's presumed interests or professional context (e.g., music promotion to business contacts) is a hallmark of spam. It demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of audience targeting and professionalism.
- Misleading language: Phrases like 'Thank you for receiving and enjoying this advertisement' in unsolicited emails are disingenuous and further confirm the spammy nature of the message. Such attempts at politeness do not negate the lack of consent.
- Lack of control: Persistent, unsolicited messaging over multiple days from the same sender, despite no engagement, indicates a lack of proper email list management and an absence of effective feedback mechanisms. This can lead to your emails going to spam, as detailed in our guide on why your emails are going to spam.
- Typographical errors: Poor grammar, spelling errors, and misplaced punctuation make emails appear unprofessional and can significantly hurt their credibility, impacting open rates and deliverability.
Key considerations
- Consent is paramount: Always prioritize obtaining explicit consent from recipients before sending any marketing emails. This is the cornerstone of good email deliverability and compliance.
- Content relevance and quality: Ensure your email content is relevant to your audience and provides value. Poorly written, confusing, or off-topic emails are often flagged as unprofessional or spam. This is critical for avoiding deliverability issues, as discussed in our article on how to diagnose email deliverability issues.
- Professional tone and design: Maintain a professional tone and clean design. Avoid excessive emojis, all-caps, or overly aggressive sales language, as these can trigger spam filters and alienate recipients. Mailchimp provides good examples of unprofessional emails to avoid.
- Appropriate responses to spam: While frustrating, directly hostile responses to spammers are generally unproductive. The most effective actions are marking as spam, blocking the sender, and unsubscribing if a legitimate link is present. For severe cases, reporting to authorities might be an option.
What email marketers say
Email marketers often encounter unprofessional tactics, both as recipients and, sometimes, as senders in their early days. The consensus emphasizes that such tactics not only frustrate recipients but also significantly undermine the sender's brand and deliverability. Discussion among marketers frequently revolves around the clear signs of unprofessionalism and the emotional toll of dealing with relentless spam.
Key opinions
- Spammer audacity: Marketers are often surprised by the bold, misguided approaches spammers take, such as directly harvesting addresses from professional sites like LinkedIn for unrelated commercial pitches.
- Common frustrations: Many marketers admit to feeling the urge to send aggressive replies to persistent spammers, highlighting the severe frustration unprofessional emails cause.
- Evolution of spam: There's a shared sentiment that spam has evolved from crude street-level tactics to infiltrating professional platforms, making it more insidious.
- Learning curve: Some marketers acknowledge having considered similarly unprofessional tactics when they were new to the industry, emphasizing the importance of learning proper email etiquette.
Key considerations
- Target audience fit: Sending content that is irrelevant to the recipient's context, such as music to LinkedIn connections, is a major misstep and often indicates poor market research.
- Impact on brand: Unprofessional emails, whether due to poor content, design, or aggressive sending, significantly harm a brand's image and make it appear untrustworthy. Such tactics can also lead to issues with affiliate marketing email being considered spam.
- Ethical sourcing: Marketers must avoid scraped lists (e.g., from LinkedIn) as they lead to spam complaints and blocklistings. For more on this, consider our insights on recourse for spam sent from scraped lists.
- Professional conduct: The appearance of professionalism is critical. Email examples provided by FluentCRM demonstrate bad practices, highlighting the importance of well-crafted, relevant, and grammatically correct messages.
Marketer view
Marketer from Email Geeks suggests that expressing frustration directly to spammers, even with unprofessional language, is a common reaction for those who have received excessive unwanted emails.
Marketer view
Marketer from Email Geeks questions the relevance of niche music (e.g., 'groovy Electric Folk') being advertised to LinkedIn connections, highlighting a significant mismatch between content and audience.
What the experts say
From an email deliverability and anti-spam perspective, experts strongly condemn tactics that violate user consent or exhibit clear signs of spamming. They focus on the long-term damage these unprofessional behaviors inflict on sender reputation and overall email ecosystem health. The general sentiment is that while recipient frustration is understandable, professional responses are more effective for a healthy email environment.
Key opinions
- Reputational damage: Experts emphasize that tactics like harvesting email addresses from public sources lead directly to damaged sender reputation, blocklistings, and failed deliverability.
- Spam filter triggers: Consistent unprofessional characteristics, such as poor design, misleading subject lines, or irrelevant content, are key indicators that email filters use to classify messages as spam, causing them to be sent to junk folders or rejected outright.
- Ethical considerations: Unsolicited email, particularly from harvested lists, is fundamentally unethical and runs counter to established email marketing best practices aimed at respecting user privacy and inbox integrity.
- Ineffectiveness of hostile replies: While human nature might lead to angry responses, experts agree that such replies are generally unproductive in stopping spam and might even inadvertently validate the recipient's address to the spammers.
Key considerations
- Prioritize consent-based marketing: Build email lists through opt-in methods only. This ensures higher engagement and significantly reduces spam complaints. This approach also reduces the likelihood of being listed on a domain email blacklist.
- Leverage feedback loops: For legitimate senders, engaging with abuse complaints and feedback loops is crucial for identifying and addressing issues quickly, improving sender reputation.
- Maintain high content standards: Always ensure your email content is professional, relevant, and free of errors. This aligns with recipient expectations and avoids spam classifications. SpamResource offers valuable resources on best practices to avoid spam.
- Educate about appropriate responses: Inform users about the most effective ways to deal with spam, such as marking it as junk, blocking the sender, or using unsubscribe links, rather than engaging directly with spammers.
Expert view
Email Deliverability Expert from Email Geeks humorously suggests that the prevalence of spam on LinkedIn is making even autoplay trap videos seem like a more interesting alternative, highlighting the poor user experience.
Expert view
Deliverability Consultant from Email Geeks notes that unusual and irrelevant content, such as groovy Electric Folk being spammed on LinkedIn, demonstrates a severe lack of understanding of target audiences and professional norms.
What the documentation says
Official documentation and research consistently highlight key elements that define professionalism in email marketing and the appropriate technical and behavioral responses to spam. These guidelines underscore the importance of recipient consent, clear communication, and adherence to email authentication standards to ensure successful delivery and compliance.
Key findings
- Consent requirement: Legal frameworks (e.g., CAN-SPAM, GDPR) mandate explicit consent for commercial emails, making unsolicited messages, especially from harvested lists, a direct violation.
- Clear identification: Emails must clearly identify the sender and provide a physical mailing address, along with an easy and functioning unsubscribe mechanism. Issues with companies ignoring opt-out requests are a major compliance breach.
- Spam characteristics: Documentation defines spam as unsolicited, bulk messages, emphasizing that unprofessional design, misleading subject lines, and irrelevant content are key indicators for spam filters.
- Authentication: Proper email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) is a critical technical standard for legitimate senders. A lack of these can lead to messages being flagged as unprofessional or suspicious. Learn more in our simple guide to DMARC, SPF, and DKIM.
Key considerations
- Adherence to regulations: Businesses must comply with all relevant anti-spam laws to avoid penalties and maintain a trustworthy sender reputation.
- User experience focus: Official guidelines emphasize that the goal of email marketing is to deliver valuable content to interested recipients, not to bombard them with unsolicited messages.
- Proactive spam avoidance: Implement best practices from the outset, including regular list hygiene and content optimization, to avoid behaviors that lead to spam complaints and blocklist listings.
- Definition of spam: The Influencer Marketing Hub defines spam as unsolicited messages sent in bulk, which underscores the primary issue with unprofessional tactics.
Technical article
Documentation from Influencer Marketing Hub defines spam as unsolicited messages, primarily emails, distributed to a large number of recipients, noting that while generally unethical, many still engage in it.
Technical article
Technical Documentation from Mailgun indicates that emails resembling spam, due to unprofessional design or overzealous selling, are highly likely to generate increased spam complaints, directly impacting deliverability rates.
Related resources
4 resources
Related pages
Why your emails are going to spam in 2024 and how to fix it
How to diagnose email deliverability issues and prevent emails from going to spam?
How to Identify Email Spam Traps?
What happens when your domain is on an email blacklist?
A simple guide to DMARC, SPF, and DKIM
Why do companies ignore email opt-out requests and unsubscribe preferences?
Should email senders respond to abuse complaints and feedback loops?
An in-depth guide to email blocklists
A practical guide to understanding your email domain reputation
Spam traps: what they are and how they work
