What Are Spam Traps?
Spam traps are email addresses that look innocuous but are used by email service providers (ESPs) or blacklist sites to make sure email marketers are following best practices. Once you hit one it can take a significant amount of time to repair the damage of blacklisting or potential suspension of service by your ESP. Most organizations running spam traps are trying to be helpful, and a few are just trying to cause as much trouble for marketers as possible. Luckily the latter are in the minority.
Why Are Life Science Marketers Particularly Susceptible?
The short answer is that many of your colleagues in sales, support, etc. will enter addresses into your customer relationship management (CRM) system without properly securing permission or flagging them for no marketing emails. Usually it’s non-malicious activity. And, the main reason is that many of the life science customers email addresses are public information. For example, universities routinely publish their faculty email addresses, publications list emails of the contact author, and grant awards have email addresses. Make sure you always have a choice for your colleagues to show that permission has been granted for marketing email.
How to Avoid Spam Traps:
Keep your email database clean – email it frequently and send out subscriber preferences email every six months. If one of your metrics is total subscriber base, remove that from your key performance indicators as its quality not quantity that really matters.
Segment your email address so you can target messages and if you do hit a spam trap, it’s easier to isolate by a permission pass or other method.
Be cautious when starting a new job or inheriting a database through other methods.
Use a data service that can validate email addresses in your email database. It generally doesn’t cost more than a couple of cents per email address.
Contact me if you’d like to know what spam traps have caused problems for life science marketers in the past or if you’ve had an experience with spam traps that you’d like to share.