How to prevent your emails from going to spam

Media post indicates that the number of emails that ended up in the spam folder in 2020 averaged 7%.

If your emails are among that 7%, then it may be due to poor sending reputation and low engagement.

On the flip side, if the sender’s reputation is decent then the news is bad. Your mails no more interest your subscribers. These good emails are landing in the spam folder.

 But the fact is, the situation can be reversed with the right practices.

Some features of spam emails:

• Poor grammar
• Deceiving or invisible headers
• Anonymous sender
• Bulk emails lacking personalization
• Asks for suspicious actions or information
• Irrelevant attachment’
• Multiple links with virus possibility

In this post, we will cover the best practices to keep your mails from landing as spam.
Maximize your email deliverability

If your emails are consistently landing in the spam folder, it is no joke. It is a serious issue that might affect your engagement rates and ROI.

Here’s what you can do to prevent your mails from going to spam:

1. Ensure a consistent sending identity

Sending id comprises the sending IP address and sending domain. It allows the mailbox to catch the source of an incoming email. Maintaining a consistent sending identity is the first step to ensuring spam-free mails.

While determining the domain reputation, ensure to address the below parameters:

• Inbox placement rate: the percentage of the emails sent from a given domain
• Spam placement rate: percentage of email sent from a spam folder domain
• “This is not a spam” rate: It is the percentage of recipients who received an email from this domain in their spam folder and marked it as “not spam.”
• Complaint rate:  the percentage of recipients who reported a domain for spam

Stress upon avoiding complain rate, else it could lead to soaring unsubscribes.

2. Be transparent about your schedule

Building relationship before marketing is imperative for any brand online. Let your subscribers decide what kind of relationship they want to have with you from the beginning.

The best way to do so is by granting freedom to your subscribers to decide what kind of content they would like to engage with. Let them decide:

• How often they want to hear from you
• The specific time of the day they would like to receive your mail
• Type of content they would be interested in receiving
• Whether they would like to unsubscribe or pause receiving updates for a while

3. Use the right sender’s name

One of the most common mistakes marketers commit is using the wrong sender’s name. Here is the data of why your emails are landing in the spam folder.

According to pep post, here are the parameters that decide open rates:

• The organization is from 64%
• The subject line: 47%
• The offer: 26%
• The first few lines of the email: 14%
• Don’t open emails from a business: 7%
• Expected length of the email: 4%

Noe, you must have figured out what’s causing your mails to land in the spam folder.  Finding the cause and revising the email strategy can help win loyal subscribers.

4. Ask the subscribers to Whitelist you

Asking the subscribers to whitelist you is one of the best ways to make it to their inbox. Once a subscriber adds you to his contact, he agrees upon receiving an update from you.  Thus, as soon as anyone joins your email list, ask them to whitelist you.

5. Authenticate your email

Email authentication might be a long and tiresome process, but it is imperative for ensuring the legitimacy of your emails. Subscribers and mail providers trust more the emails that are authentic and these are more likely to make their way to the inbox than the spam folder. 
Here is how you can authenticate your email:

• SPF method: Sender’s Policy framework (SPF) confirms the identity of the senders by comparing the sender’s IP with the list of IPs authorized to send from that domain.
• DKIM method: Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) ensure that email does not tamper during the transmission process
• DMARC method: Domain-Based Messaging Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) uses both DKIM and SPF to send and deliver mail.
• BIMI method: Brand Indicator for Message Identification (BIMI) attaches your business logo to emails and ensures more recognizability.

 You can identify your mail by adopting these methods and ensure your emails get delivered in the right spot.

6. Remove inactive subscribers

Email marketing ensures good money. Yeah, that’s true! But are your email marketing efforts directed in the right direction?

It is critical to find and remove passive subscribers as they could affect your deliverability. How?

Constantly bombarding the emails to passive subscribers increase the number of spam complaints.

Unengaged subscribers lead to low engagement and thus affect deliverability

Solution:

• Set clear indication during the sign-up process
• Use double opt-in, where appropriate ‘
• Ensure valuable and functional experience
• Reduce frequency of sending mails
• Use segmentation and personalization to capture subscriber’s preferences

7. Build your own email list

Do you want your emails to land in the inbox of uninterested subscribers? No!

To avoid doing so:

• Stop sharing a list with a partner
• Renting or co-registering email from the third party
• Abandon the practice of scrapping email (use of a robot to collect emails)
• Building your list organically benefits in the long turn. It might not be the fastest way to do so but surely provide promising results.

8. Provide a Double Opt-in

Verifying recipients before launching mails is a sure-fire way to ensure that you are sending emails to the persons who are genuinely interested to listen to you. Using a double-opt-in ensures that subscribers consent to receive emails from you. You can do so, by sending them a confirmation or welcome mail.

Once they, confirm it, congrats! They are on your mailing list!

Situations where you cannot send mails:

• The mailing list was rented from a seller
• Email addresses belonging to participants and exhibitions

How to verify deliverability status:

• Deliverable: recipient’s email is valid
• Invalid: Recipient’s address does not exist
• Accept all: the email addresses that can’t be fully validated
• Disposable: temporarily valid address
• Unknown: the recipient’s server is not responding
• Spam traps: address created to identify spams

This is how you can verify the emails.

9. Increase subscriber engagement

The higher your user engagement rate, the more favor you will share of the mailbox providers. For gaining the attention of the passive subscribers, you can trigger a re-engagement campaign. By passive subscribers, I meant the ones who haven’t clicked or open your mails for 6 months. Segment these into -buyers and passive subscribers and trigger different re-engagement campaigns for each.

10. Revise your content strategy

Watch if the subscribers are finding your content useful? Run a survey or a personalized mail asking their preferences. Check the messages you are creating to send your subscribers. Are they interesting?

Points to improve deliverability:

• Don’t use short URLs
• Refrain from using complex codes
• Don’t use words like free, discount in subject lines
• Don’t overuse exclamation marks
• Don’t forget to check the HTML code
• Add alt text in images

Now that you understand the factors that may affect the success of your email marketing efforts, you ought to address them NOW.

Know how Click Nurture can help you revolutionize the email marketing process, Contact us today!