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Today, I'd like to share with you an email I wrote to people who downloaded our email deliverability guide. After sending it, I realized that as someone interested in learning more about email marketing, you might benefit from the advice in it too. In it, I talk about a common mistake that can make you look like a spammer, even though you're not. Read on for the article, and if you're interested in more tips on how to reach the inbox, grab a free copy of our Email Deliverability Guide by signing up to our blog. Cheers, Justin Premick Education Marketing Manager at AWeber

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We're known, as the saying goes, by the company we keep.

When it comes to email, you associate not only with the email marketing service you use to run your campaigns, but also with:

	Advertisers
	Business Partners and Joint Venture Partners
	Products/Sites You Promote as an Affiliate

While none of these are technically part of your company, their actions can affect how ISPs view your email.

You need to choose partners whose email practices are as squeaky clean as your own.

If you choose poorly, ISPs will start dumping your email in the spam folder.

How Other Companies Can Hurt Your Delivery Rates

ISPs consider many factors when deciding if they should put an email in the inbox or not.

Two of those factors are:

	Whether previous email messages from that sender generate a lot of spam complaints
	What content appears in the message - including links

We know from the first point that ISPs look at past emails, and whether they caused spam complaints, to decide what to do with future emails.

We also know that ISPs look not only at who is sending an email, but what content and links appear in that email.

Now combine those two facts. What do you get?

ISPs Block Emails With Spammy Links

Most of us would agree that ISPs block emails that contain certain "spammy" content.

	(Forgive me for oversimplifying a bit - many factors go into blocking/filtering an email and including one "spammy" word is not necessarily going to get you blocked. Hopefully you see the overall point I'm trying to make here.)

The classic example of this, of course, are emails promoting a certain well-known drug that starts with the letter V.

But why do ISPs block emails advertising that? How do they know those are spam?

They Listen To Their Users

Do ISPs have someone sit down and say, "OK, let's come up with a list of all the words and content a spammer would use in his/her emails?"

Certainly not - that would take a ridiculously long time, and would never be a complete list because spam tactics are constantly changing.

What they do, as noted above, is look at what emails are generating complaints.

If enough users complain about emails that link to a certain website, the ISP will associate that website with spam...

...And They'll Block Other Emails Linking To That Website!

And this is why you have to carefully vet:

	Advertisers
	Business Partners and Joint Venture Partners
	Anyone Else You Link To

If you link to a domain, even if it's just an ad that you're running in your email newsletter, and that domain has been tied to spam, your email can be blocked for linking to it.

Accidentally associate with spammers, even a little, and you make it easy for an ISP to think you're one, too.