If you’re trying to improve your hotel email deliverability a great place to start is understanding everything that is out to stop it. It’s rather safe to say that almost all email outside of an organization is considered spam until proven innocent. Here are six types of filters. Your email will encounter one or more of these along its way.

1. Content filters – review the content within a message to determine if it is spam or not
2. Header filters – review the email header in search of falsified information
3. General blacklist filters – stop all emails that come from a blacklisted file of known spammers
4. Rules-based filters – use user-defined criteria – such as specific senders or specific wording in the subject line or body – to block spam
5. Permission filters – require anyone sending a message to be pre-approved by the recipient
6. Challenge-response filters – require anyone sending a message to enter a code in order to gain permission to send email

It’s time to start thinking in signals.
Signals can be responses to your marketing activity, such as ad clicks, social interactions, or website visits, along with derived performance indicators provided by marketing platforms such as click-through rate or cost-per-conversion. These signals provide the best picture of audience interest and intent, as well as marketing performance, across paid, earned and owned media.
One of the biggest mistakes hotel marketing managers make in email marketing is NOT putting enough offers or links into their marketing emails.

InBox Placement is crucial
Sending domains can be used across multiple IP addresses and multiple email service providers. ISPs have adapted to weigh this piece of information the most heavily when deciding whether or not to trust your mail–essentially ISPs take the stance that you’re guilty until proven innocent.

They do this because businesses tend to want to have their emails look like they are coming from their website and, as a result, change their sending domain less than other elements of their sending infrastructure. It is crucial that you do not send to people who don’t engage with your emails because ISPs will believe that all email from your sending domain are not wanted, resulting in more of your emails landing in the spam or junk folder.

A From address is the reply-to email address you use for your campaigns. Not to be confused with a From Label, which is just the name that comes through as the sender when an email is received. For example, a campaign email might have the From Label as Mark | YourBrand, but the reply-to address is [email protected].