What is spam really? We think we have legal definitions that should suffice, but in many ways, spam is in the eyes of the beholder. To put a twist on a well-known proverb, “One man’s spam is another man’s treasure.†If spammers weren’t making money, they wouldn’t spam. Someone somewhere is handing over a credit card number and saying “yes†to the spammer’s offer, whether that’s something as outrageous as property in Costa Rica or as prosaic as cufflinks. What’s spam/trash to one person is spoils/treasure to another. One doesn’t want it. The other does. The definition of spam might be clear on paper, but in practice in the inbox, it isn’t cut and dry. It’s really in the eyes of the beholder. And that matters when you’re trying to adhere to email deliverability best practices and protect your reputation. If you’re doing everything right in your opinion, adhering to all those best practices, why are you being called spam? The problem lies in part with the loose definition of spam, one that can vary from individual to individual. Many people will flag an email as spam simply to stop getting emails from a business. They don’t consider it spam according to the legal definition, but it is spam in their opinion because they don’t want it. We’ve also set ourselves up for this easy reputation degradation, if you will, by email marketing practices of the past. Because of those past practices, we now view email marketing as set apart from other forms of marketing, and we hold it to a different standard—or at least we are far less tolerant of how it is used as a marketing tool. We’re more accepting of direct mail, TV commercials and banner ads from companies we don’t know than we are of emails…from companies we do know. All this vagueness around the definition of spam matters when you’re trying to protect your online sending reputation and keep your email deliverability rate as high as possible. And that keeps taking us back to the same core fundamentals of email deliverability best practices: Be relevant Be sensitive Be subscriber-centric Segment and target Test and measure Listen You won’t please every subscriber every time, but more emphasis on relevance will lead to fewer reports of spam. And that, in turn, will help your email deliverability rate…and email marketing ROI. http://blog.deliverability.com
The fact that spam, to a typical person, means "Email I don't want right now" is the entire reason these 'sender reputation' things based on users' feedback are a load of shit. There currently is no legal definition for spam because it would conflict with the CDA...although there should be a legal definition. Personally I don't think you need to take extra steps beyond making sure the email is consistent from subject to message content.
