Junk it is…

Here’s my workflow for handling junk mail, the kind that still shows up even after using some of the best spam protection out there.

When an email arrives, I glance over the sender’s name and subject. If it’s a promotion of some kind, I quickly scan the content and scroll down to find an unsubscribe link. If there’s one, I simply unsubscribe and move the email to my Junk folder. If there’s no unsubscribe link, well you know, it still goes to junk.

Besides these, there are other emails that fall in the growth marketing category, and I simply mark them as junk, because they’re mostly written poorly and are downright uninspiring. All such emails get sent to my Apple Mail junk folder, where they stay for a while.

About once a week, I report all these emails as spam to our spam filtering software, SpamExperts, so that way, it knows what kind of emails to keep away from me in future. The process is a bit tedious and involves saving every email as an email file that then get uploaded to SpamExperts for training.

As a rule, any email that’s got nothing to do with me or tries to sell, goes to Junk, and gets reported as spam.

The takeaway here from a marketing perspective is to reach out to someone you really know, and have formed a relationship with, like your customers or someone who subscribes to your newsletter or the like.

Even better, request them to forward your emails to friends and family, that way you’ve got a genuine introduction, one that’s more trustworthy.

Shooting emails wildly in the dark is only going to get you that, blacklisted.