Anti-Spam Policy
At ZagoMail, we work in the best interest of protecting the privacy and time of all small businesses, non-profit organizations, and their desired audience. We believe that all the services provided by companies should be done with the utmost honesty and integrity, caring for the quality of the service provided while respecting the consented agreement of all the parties involved.
As is commonly known, non-consented bulk messages (known as spam) violate the necessity of having respect and integrity within any marketing business strategy, which is why ZagoMail is fiercely working against it. Not only are they time-consuming for the people that receive these types of messages, but they can represent a loss of income and reputation for any company or organization.
When unsolicited messages are sent in bulk, there is a high probability that the users that receive such messages create sufficient reports that’ll catch the eye of Internet Service Providers (ISPs). This means that, if someone uses ZagoMail with this dishonest purpose, it has a chance of being blocked by ISPs per user request, and many customers may suffer from this.
The email marketing channel is controlled by the ISPs and its users, which is why ZagoMail wants to create awareness by establishing proper and authoritative protection by being compliant with Anti-Spam laws. This means that under no circumstance ZagoMail shall be used for unwanted spam messages of any kind, including those that fall under the Prohibited Content Policy. You can find more information about this in our current Terms of Service.
What counts as Spam?
There are different interpretations around what counts and what doesn’t count as spam, depending on the platform, page, or area you currently work at. However, for the matters of email marketing, spam takes one solid definition:
- SPAM means unsolicited messages sent in bulk (term used to refer to group messaging) without the previous affirmative consent of the receiver.
To clarify the matter most understandably, here are some indicators that usually distinguish a spam email message. Spam Messages are those that:
- Are sent to multiple users at once, without proper consent nor any explicit written expression of authorization for such messages.
- Includes commercial or non-commercial content, often promoting a product, service, or idea, without adding the proper value to the marketing itself.
- Are often insistent and persistent, making the user uncomfortable, stressed, and wary.
- Often the culprit behind lost legitimate emails due to the constant traffic of emails.The content of the Spam messages is not very essential. What’s essential is that the user never gave permission to the sender to hold their email addresses in their list, and that is what makes it a spam message in the first place.
Spammers often get their emailing list from immoral or anti-ethical practices, such as stealing the email addresses from hacked computers, and so on. Hence, every company must have the compromise on combating spam and never use it as a marketing strategy.
Why is ZagoMail strict when it comes to Spam?
ZagoMail wishes to provide quality service to all customers, which is why we take the commitment of monitoring list uploads, complaints, and other types of performance metrics to ensure that there are no problems.
We understand how uncomfortable it is for recipients to get spam messages in their inboxes, as well as how it impacts the overall success of the sender and the email software itself.
Because we want to avoid detrimental spam complaints that may result in us being blocked from the servers and thus affecting our customers, ZagoMail has taken a strict commitment to fight against spam by being compliant with Anti-Spamming laws and monitoring the interaction of each customer with our software to prevent it from happening.
As a result, we can provide you with longer customer service, care, and assistance in your marketing goals in an honest way, without compromising you or us along the way.
How can I avoid spamming?
For a message to not be counted as spam, the message has to be sent to the target user or users explicitly offering their affirmative consent. This means that they willingly must give you permission for you to hold their email in your marketing list and therefore you’ll be allowed to send emails about updates, promotions, or any other information that involves your company or non-profit organization.
How does ZagoMail proceed when they receive a lot of spam complaints or run into a compliance problem?
ZagoMail has a Compliance team that works with customers closely to ensure their success. When ZagoMail identifies a problem related to spam complaints or compliance issues, we first conduct a thorough investigation where we aim to ask questions to the customer and understand their marketing goals and strategies.
Our main focus will be to try to uncover the root of the problem, so we will discuss their mailing list and their current strategy to see what’s the best way to resolve the problem. If possible, we’ll help the customer re-route their focus by guiding them to ensure that the customer can continue using our services without falling into the spamming category.
In case the way this customer’s work isn’t up to our standards, still contains problematic emailing lists, still fails to comply with our anti-spam policy, or still has any other issue pertaining to compliance with our Terms of Service, we reserve our right to politely ask them to find another service provider.
What are good email practices to avoid becoming a spammer?
A good email marketer knows that good emailing practices aren’t developed in the blink of an eye. It takes time and serious compromise, study, and analysis to be able to explore all the valid content resources to create good email campaigns.
Moreover, for every company or non-profit, it is critical to avoid being labeled as a “Spammer”. Although there are various tips and tricks to avoid this, the best thing to do is to maintain the focus on the most essentials:
- Always ask for the user’s consent
Good email marketers always look for recipients who provide their consent to receive their messages. Doing the contrary will result in spam, and therefore risk your business and ZagoMail altogether. Also, never hide your intentions regarding constant emailing or who you are as a brand.
You can look for your target user’s consent by providing them a way to handle it to you, let it be via subscription methods or replies via direct message.
- Build trust responsibly
Good email marketers know that it’s important to create a community where you can share the message of your brand to build trust and authority. This message should be consistent with what you want to do as a business or nonprofit owner, and the purpose of it shouldn’t deviate elsewhere. Keep a consistent plan and stick with it, and never consider non-permission email listings, as this can affect the overall success of your company by giving you short-term outcomes, and not really bringing you the results you desire.
- Always keep realistic expectations regarding content and frequency
The contacts in your emailing lists should know about the content they’ll receive, and this shouldn’t turn into anything that deviates from the original purpose. Do this by providing examples of your emails so that they can decide if they want to keep receiving messages from you, or not.
Make sure to keep them updated about how often they’ll receive emails and ensure to keep your word for it. Remember that abusing the amazing tool email marketing brings by over-emailing or under-emailing may cause you a lot of problems, and will result in your contacts not trusting you again.
- Make your communications valuable
Add value to your email marketing campaigns by personalizing your emails in a way that provokes your readers to engage with your message. “Engagement” is a very resounding word in marketing, and it’s also a metric used by ISPs that helps them know where to place the email that’s been sent to a user.
If you send emails that don’t create interest nor compel your readers enough to create this engagement, chances are that they won’t open more emails from you later on. Low engagement will make your emails end up in your audience’s junk mail or spam folder, and the worst-case scenario is that they’ll end up getting blocked entirely.
Always make sure to add value to your content by sending things you know your audience will love. Analyze this by knowing the common interests or values of your customer avatar, and be dynamic and creative with what you’ll give them. Doing so will help you make room for engagement, leading to successful email campaigns.
What is Anti-Spam law?
AntiSpam policies were built to regulate the communication between marketers or any email sender and different users.
In the case of the United States of America, Congress signed a bill in 2003 named the CAN-SPAM act, which regulates commercial email and establishes legal requirements for email marketers. Failing to comply with that law can cost you more than 40K dollars in fines, per non-solicited recipient.
Although this law had the purpose of lessening the increasing threat of non-solicited messaging, it still didn’t prevent spam from happening. Yet, it did help lower the cases of spam.
Even though ZagoMail approves strongly of fighting against spam, it doesn’t believe that the CAN-SPAM act is strong enough for protecting email users, which is why we took the extra step of including this Anti-Spam policy and other regulations under our current Terms of Sevice.
The Anti-Spam Laws will vary depending on the state, city, or country where you live. Keep in mind that most of these laws fall into federal law because it is a method of keeping strong cyber-security, so failing to comply will give you serious problems that may even take you to court. We strongly advise that you consult with the federal laws of your state or country, or consult an attorney for more details.
How does ZagoMail work to protect against spam messages?
ZagoMail works hard on helping customers understand what things are permissible and what things aren’t to ensure that they don’t end up committing spam and affecting their business and our software in the process.
Thanks to our highly trained Compliance team, we can use the full spectrum of people, processes, and technology alongside a variety of tools to evaluate each account thoroughly as they grow using the platform.
Here are some of the actions that we do to ensure the compliance of each customer:
- LEGAL. We give a clear and detailed explanation for each one of our clauses inside our current Terms of Service, and we require each customer to read and consent to them. Additionally, each time a customer uploads a contact list, we request them to agree that they are consent-based and not otherwise.
- EDUCATION. We want our customers to know the latest news and trends that surround email marketing, which is why ZagoMail has taken the compromise to keep them updated on the best email marketing practices, pro tips, and proper email etiquette through our blogs, seminars, training, and award-winning Marketing Resource Center.
- COLLABORATION. ZagoMail is registered with major Internet Service Providers and Anti-Spam authorities to receive automated feedback loop (FBL) data when receiving an abuse report from any of our customer’s contacts, which will be used to take disciplinary action. We also use third-party technology that helps identify suspicious contact lists and campaign content that have the potential to violate our Anti-Spam Policy.
- VERIFICATION. ZagoMail provides a “Join My Mailing List” feature that lets a customer add new contacts, and send them an email looking to confirm their consent to receiving more emails. If your contact changes his or her interests or if they unsubscribe, ZagoMail will also send an email confirmation on your behalf.
- UNSUBSCRIPTION. Every email generated with ZagoMail contains an Unsubscribe button or link below the message a customer sends, allowing contacts to have the option of opting out of future emails. It also automatically updates contact lists to avoid the chance of sending spam messages in the near future.
- IDENTIFICATION. ZagoMail presets your email header so that it can remain compliant with proper email etiquette and Anti-Spam laws. We make sure that your email’s “From Adress” rigorously identifies you as the sender.
- CONTACT INFORMATION. All your emails are pre-filled with your contact information, such as your physical address.
Report Abuse
If you believe a ZagoMail customer is sending unsolicited emails, you are free to report it to us by sending it to [email protected]. Once a member of ZagoMail’s Compliance team sees the email, he or she will classify it and we will begin a thorough process of investigation. We will also take action against the sender once everything is properly considered.