Recovering from a history of spam

[Anonymous]

Hi all, 
In the past, my company used to have some Affiliate companies send out emails on our behalf. They, needless to say, had some pretty spammy behaviors. We have since shaped up - it has been about a year since we've stopped using these affiliate companies, signed up with Marketo, and have been in strict compliance with CAN-SPAM. However, It seems that no matter what we send, Google Apps & Outlook will continue to filter out our emails as spam (I'm using Email on Acid to test this). 

Would a history of spam messages related to our brand affect our sending domain, even if the emails were coming from a different IP? If so, does anyone have any advice as to how to recover from this? If not, are there any nuances related to Google Apps, Gmail or Outlook that we should be aware of so we can pass these spam tests?

[Matt_Stone2]

Sender reputation will follow you regardless of the IP address. For the most part, email clients have similar rules to adhere to:

• Avoid spammy words/symbols (free, $ signs, ! points, and more)
• Proper image-to-text ratio
• Not including certain things like link shorteners

There's tons of content on these, like this one: http://kb.mailchimp.com/article/about-spam-filters/

Also, check this site to see if your IP and/or domain name are blacklisted: http://mxtoolbox.com/

There's also other sites you can check this, so I'd advise looking at those also.

[Josh_Hill13]

Agree with Matt. Use some tools to mitigate this over time.

http://www.slideshare.net/jdavidhill/marketo-email-reputation-management

IBM Deliverability Tools
ReturnPath
Litmus - to fix wording and html to avoid spam filters

Install DKIM and SPF for your domain so Marketo emails are full verified as coming from you.

Sadly a bad reputation will take time to restore.

[Anonymous]

@Josh - that email rep document has been my "Deliverability Bible" and we have seen a good amount of improvement since implementing some of those guidelines, so it really has been helpful. 

There are some tools  here I haven't looked into yet...thank you both for providing! 

On a sort of related note - many resources are saying that we should address the emails to the person's name instead of just their email address to signify that we actually know the recipient. When testing, I noticed that Marketo does not automatically do this. Are we able to personalize the "To:" field using tokens? I don't see a place in Email Editor to do this.