My email went into a spam folder!

How to communicate with your potential renters - how to turn site visitors into enquiries, and enquiries into bookings.
Breton Girl
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My email went into a spam folder!

Post by Breton Girl »

Hi everyone, this is my first posting although I have been reading (and learning an awful lot! :) ) the forum for a while now.
We are in our second year of renting out and it's all been going well but this week I had an email I sent back to someone who wanted to book go into his email spam folder. Luckily he was very keen to come to our place and after 4 days (I replied within an hour of his request) looked in his spam folder as he thought he ought to have had a reply and found it so has now booked.
What I wanted to ask is if there is any tips for stopping emails going into spam folders that anyone can tell me?
Do you all do anything to guard against this? I can only think of phoning but I don't want to seem pushy.

Any advise would be very welcome, thanks
brenda
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Post by brenda »

Direct replies from enquiries via rental listing sites have a habit of going into the recipients Spam files by mistake. Therefore, although I do reply to the listing site contact, I also send a separate covering email.

Also, putting your website address on a reply to an enquiry received via a listing site can also cause it to go into a Spam file on occasions. Therefore I only ever put our website address on the covering email.

Hope this makes sense.
Breton Girl
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Post by Breton Girl »

Thanks for that information Brenda, I'll do the same in future!
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Cassis
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Post by Cassis »

I would never use a freebie email address (like hotmail) for business use for this reason, as they tend to get caught in spam filters more often (I've read).

Sometimes it's more to do with the recipient's spam settings - like not accepting anything from addresses that aren't in his address book. You can't do anything about that, unfortunately.
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Chianti
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Post by Chianti »

I've only ever had a problem once. Now just to be sure, I delete the listing site's email address and any unnecessary bits, but I do use my website address minus the www.
Chianti

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linda147
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Post by linda147 »

this has happened to me a couple of times that I know about. People have contacted me weeks later saying my e-mail has gone into their spam folder and they are very sorry but they have found alternative accommodation :x
I also now send 2 e-mails and just hope one of them gets through. I think it does depend on people's spam settings, although that doesn't explain why the competition's e-mails get through and mine don't.
I use message tag so that I know if someone reads my e-mail but this is not 100% unfortunately.
I wish I knew the answer! :lol:
Breton Girl
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Post by Breton Girl »

Thanks everyone for your thoughts. I use an email address from our ISP and do not have a link to our website on it as I reckon if they've got as far as enquiring they have probably already seen the site.
Linda, I agree that the read notification is a bit hit or miss! Sometimes I get told they've read it and sometimes they don't but I always put it on and live in hope that it works.

At least I know there's nothing daft I do that makes it happen!! :roll:
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visitslovenija
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Post by visitslovenija »

ehm, I know I'm a bit late replying to this one, but maybe this might help:

Spam filters will tend to reject mail that is HTML formatted - certainly look at them more critically. So if you can, stick to just plain text emails (it will be an option in your account settings) and you should not have a problem.

Ralph

www.visitslovenija.eu
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Gite Guru
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Post by Gite Guru »

there are a million and one reasons why your email might be caught as spam. Thankfully, there's some useful tools out there to check what error in your email might be causing it to be spammed.

here's one of them, you send your email to them, and they return you a report, for free: http://spamcheck.sitesell.com/

hth,

GG2
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linda147
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Post by linda147 »

Using the spam check I had a spam score of 0.9 so I shouldn't be having any problems. The only thing I had was an image in my e-mail (I have an electronic business card with website, phone number etc).
I also use message tag but there was no comment about that. I used to use ReadNotify and definitely think I was having problems so I stopped using it - shame because it gave lots of useful information! :wink:
Thanks for the link - I feel a bit more reassured now! :)
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Gite Guru
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Post by Gite Guru »

is the image hosted or embedded? If I were you, I'd consider getting rid of it, as it's the likely culprit.

I've tried all sorts of fancy email tricks in my time, and always come back to using plan old text each time.

kr,

Dave
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Post by la vache! »

That's a useful tool GGuru, thankyou! Mine was 0.2 with a gmail address and one http link to my website. Funnily enough the risk was higher, 0.5, with my domain email address. With the old H-R enquiries the risk was only 0.8, not high enough for it to be spammed under normal circumstances.
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Topcat
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Post by Topcat »

Yes, that was a really useful tool, so thanks. I came out at 0.3, so shouldn't have any problems, which was good to know!

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