We’re often asked about Persado’s impact on spam rates and any best practices we recommend for avoiding being filtered to spam. This article will recap the root causes of spam, link you to helpful resources, and recap Persado’s impact to spam and recommended email KPIs.

Spam is often a tricky topic, so make sure to discuss any hot questions directly with your Persado representative so we can provide expert guidance!

Spam happens for many reasons, but despite common misconceptions, most of them are not at all tied to content. First, make sure the following basics are in place in your email:

Ultimately, many causes of spam will be out of your control. Each email service provider’s spam filter works differently, and is heavily influenced by the recipient’s behavior—that is, if they mark a message as “spam” or “junk.”

For more details on this, including information on the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, check out this helpful article from Mailchimp. Or, for a shorter read, check out these 12 tips to help prevent emails from going to spam from SendGrid.

Resources on spam will often discuss (and sometimes even list) specific “trigger words” that purportedly automatically route an email to spam, saying that you should avoid using these words at all costs. Some of these words are more obvious than others, and will probably remind you of spam emails that have landed in your own inbox, like “Get out of debt,” “Pennies a day,” or “Fast cash.”

It’s important to keep in mind, however, that inbox providers don’t share details of how their automated spam detection models work, so trigger word lists are inherently speculative. There is no way to deny or confirm that they take certain keywords into account.

For example: Common marketing terms are also often included on these lists, like “Alert,” even though Persado has found this language to effectively evoke the emotion of urgency—something we’ve observed to perform particularly well. Here are a few anonymized examples of messages that outperformed the control in market:

We've done our research on Persado's impact on spam. When we've measured Persado's impact on spam rates, in most cases, results are not statistically significant one way or another. However, we have found anecdotally that we decrease spam rates because we improve overall engagement with the email. 96% of the time, our copy performs better than the control.

Our best KPI to measure email performance is click-through-rate (CTR). This is the preferred engagement metric when evaluating both subject line and email body content to understand if we’ve increased overall engagement. CTRs vary depending on the type of campaign, and the quality, creativity, and relevance of the content. They can also be influenced in the subject line, even if nothing changes in the body.

We don’t recommend using spam rates as a main decisioning KPI. If desired, we can load spam rates for a few campaigns so we can report on Persado’s impact, but we often find it is flat/not statistically significant (the volume needed to reach this significance is often prohibitive). Typically, though, we don’t see the actual content—the words and phrases–impacting spam rate one way or another, as many of the root causes of spam have nothing to do with content at all.