Planning strategy, writing copy, and designing creative are all important parts of successful email campaigns—but none of that matters if your organization’s domain health isn’t in good shape. Taking steps to protect it should always be a top priority.  

In February of 2024 Email Service Providers (ESPs), notably Gmail and Yahoo, took steps to tighten up their security and spam monitoring practices. On the user side, this means less spam and phishing, but on the email marketer side this meant more hurdles to jump through to ensure that emails aren’t landing in the spam folder.  

One thing that has become common is the use of Spam Traps by ESPs. These are emails that providers have created to monitor whether marketers are following email best practices. Some have been created and strategically placed on websites to see where the emails end up, others are old and abandoned emails that have been recycled into a sort of undercover spy in your email list.  

Fans of spy novels – or those who’ve heard of the medical procedure – might have heard of the barium swallow tactic, where a piece of information is given to only one person in order to see if they are a mole. Similarly, these spam trap emails ending up on your list tell ESP’s that you may not be following best practices, and a large number of them could show them its time to downgrade your domain status.  

Email marketing inherently means we need to walk a tightrope between best practices and ensuring communications can reach a wide audience. This means that marketers are never perfect with their practices, and spam traps are likely to end up on lists now and again. The key is to ensure this doesn’t happen to the point ESPs flag you as a spammer or downrate your domain in their system.  

The key ways to do this are:  

  • Collect emails responsibly. While it can be tempting to double your list overnight with a list buy, these lists often can have spam traps in them. When bulk adding new emails it can be helpful to run them through a service that can flag bad emails.  
  • Email only new and active emails. Create a suppression based on opens, clicks or another actionable criterion that eliminates emails which aren’t engaging with the content.  
  • Monitor KPIs and list health. Best practices are:  
  • Lists should be periodically scrubbed for domains with typos (ex: @gmal.com instead of @gmail.com) 
  • Monitor metrics 
  • Spam complaint rates should stay under 0.1% 
  • Bounce rates under 2% 
  • Open rates above 5% – ideally way higher, but 5% is the lowest. 
  • Monitor email domain health.  

Domain health and email marketing needs constant care and management, and many of these practices will help marketing efforts outside of mitigating spam traps. A continually changing landscape with new rules and algorithms being created by ESPs means we need to constantly be vigilant and make sure monitoring the technical things has a place right next to copy and strategy.