How Do You Manage Your Spam Folder?

Much has been written about how people determine if an email is spam. We typically look at the From Name and/or the Subject Line and decide if the email is wanted/expected/desired and act accordingly (read, delete, file, mark as junk). However, as I was sucking down my first cup of Bean Traders coffee this morning and plowing through the 253 emails in my spam folder…I began to think:

Do we use the same thought process in our “delete forever” decisions (purging from spam folder) as we do for “mark as junk” decisions?

In order to answer this question, I thought about how I make that decision when faced with a spam folder that looks like the one below (some words redacted to protect the innocent):

DJ's Gmail Spam Folder

The big difference for me between marking a message as spam from the inbox and deleting it forever from the spam folder is the decision time. I actually timed myself. In 5 seconds, I scanned the entire folder of 50 messages. I then clicked “select all” followed by “delete forever.” Bam. Gone. Done. Never to return.

What did I actually see in my 5 second skim? Not much.

• A bunch of spammy words and phrases like “debt” and “From Shelly Barnett”
• ALL CAPS SUBJECT LINES
• From Names of people I don’t know (”Camille Kelly”)
• Some subject lines that are not appropriate to repeat here (note blacked out items above)

Lesson Learned? Don’t even give your subscribers the chance to mark your message as spam. Once it’s in the junk folder, it’s pretty much over. Avoid the spam folder by following all of the best practices all of the time, but most importantly:

Send relevant, timely email to subscribers who’ve asked to receive it.

Simple, right?

DJ Waldow
Account Manager at Bronto

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2. Spam (with a side of Bacn) First there was Spam. Spam Spam Spam Spam Spammity...
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Tagged as: Email Marketing Best Practices, email spam, email subject lines