It’s infuriating when your email marketing campaigns go to waste even if they’re sent with malicious intent. The world of email marketing, entrepreneurship, and list management is no stranger to the hazards surrounding spam folders. When an email is marked as spam, it not only decreases future engagement with that campaign but also negatively impacts sender reputation down the line. Luckily, several strategic moves can both fix the issue and ensure it doesn’t happen again.
Identify the Root Cause of Deliverability Issues
You have to understand the source of the issue before you can fix it. There are countless signals that spam filters look at to determine what’s happening to your message from sender reputation to authentication, content, and recipient engagement. Therefore, start with your email metrics. Low open rates, high bounce rates, and excessive unsubscribes should signal content trouble. If you find these patterns in your metrics, they are the best indicators that your emails are not reaching the inbox.
Additionally, there are email testing services that show you how mailbox providers respond to your emails. Mail Tester and GlockApps offer spam scoring and provide results with great detail as to what might trigger the filter: a broken link, spammy words, no authentication, or poorly constructed body. Warmy.io is another helpful tool in this process, offering advanced diagnostics and deliverability support. Once you know what’s setting off the alarms, you can make necessary adjustments.
Review and Strengthen Your Email Authentication
Another common, albeit unseen, reason, however, is the lack of email authentication. When an email enters an inbox, it’s sometimes an ISP or mailbox provider’s email authentication that quickly assesses whether or not an email is trustworthy. Therefore, even the best intentions and crafted emails end up in spam. Three of these important protocols include SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance). These three foundational protocols ensure that an email message truly comes from your domain, hasn’t been altered along the way, and that it comes from an approved sending infrastructure.
SPF allows you to define which IP addresses are allowed to send an email on behalf of your domain. Therefore, if an email that comes into your organization does not match what is provided under the SPF record, it can be rejected or marked. DKIM gives the sending domain the option to digitally “sign” a message so that the receiving domain can ascertain that what has been received is legitimate and not falsified or manipulated. DMARC provides a policy through which SPF and DKIM can exist meaning if either or both do not authenticate, the receiving mail server will know to either quarantine, reject, or allow the email to pass.
Therefore, if any of these DNS records are missing, mismatched, or out of alignment, legitimate emails could be rejected or fail in the spam folder. It gets worse, however, if DMARC is missing because this means that cybercriminals can easily spoof your domain and send phishing emails to your audience and destroy your brand.
So ensure you collaborate with your domain registrar, IT department, or email service provider (ESP) to ensure all three protocols are created and validated correctly. The top ESPs should have built-in functionality or wizards that create and publish the needed DNS records and step users through the process. After that, use DMARC reports to analyze activity over time and see which sources are trying to validate under your domain or failing attempts.
So email authentication improves your inbox placement rate and a factor of trust with ISPs. The more trustworthy a sender is regarded, the more it will be with sender reputation a critical factor email providers use to determine if the email lands in an inbox, in spam, or not at all.
Ultimately, setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC is critical in today’s marketing atmosphere, it’s the minimum requirement for any business that wants to send its email message reliably and effectively.
Scrub and Segment Your Email List
Plus, adding emails to bad or dead addresses is not only a waste of time but also negatively impacts sender reputation. If a million addresses bounce or a solid percentage of your email list flags your email as spam (or fails to open it), mailbox providers notice, and they’re not a fan of this type of activity. This means bounce rates, senders’ open rates, and even no answer. You can avoid this situation by regularly cleaning your email list. Remove subscribers who fail to engage and remove those who have yet to activate their accounts for some time. Lowering your bounce rate improves your overall deliverability.
Furthermore, segment your list based on activity, interests, and more. Sending smaller, segmented lists dedicated and targeted content more often than not increases open and click-through rates, two metrics that mailbox providers appreciate as engagement. The more engaged your audience is, the more likely your next email isn’t going to be sent to the spam folder.
Evaluate the Content and Structure of Your Emails
Not only do spam filters become more sophisticated and updated regularly, but they monitor much more than just who is sending you the email. They pay attention to who is receiving it, too. Resisting spammy language is critical any instance of “BUY NOW,” “LIMITED TIME OFFER,” excessive exclamation points, etc. makes your email look like a solicitation, if not a scam.
This includes textual quality. Maintain an acceptable text-to-image ratio, proper and consistent HTML code (if relevant), and avoid sending massive emails with huge attachments. Always send a plain-text alternative, and ensure your option to unsubscribe is effortless to locate and execute. When you send emails appropriately without any spammy components you appear professional and compliant.
Monitor Engagement Metrics and Feedback Loops
Once you’ve ensured your email was delivered, it’s time to monitor engagement. If people aren’t engaging with your emails, if they’re not opening them or tossing them in the trash your reputation will suffer over time, regardless of using white-hat techniques. So make sure you give people reasons to engage with your emails, whether it’s a call to action, an appropriate subject line, or content that is genuinely useful.
Furthermore, sign up for feedback loop services from Yahoo, Microsoft, and Comcast. A feedback loop tells you if someone has marked you as spam, which gives you the opportunity to a. never contact that person ever again or b. take that person off future mails. Such feedback helps you not only retain a good sender reputation but also shows the ISPs that you’re doing the best you can to be a quality sender.
Warm Up Your Sending Domain or IP Address
This is especially true when you’re sending from a new domain or sending IP and have no reputation yet. You start from scratch. ISPs and mailbox providers are skeptical of sending domains that have just been activated or just been used. In fact, one of the fastest ways to get flagged is to send to thousands of people using a new sending domain or IP, and you might get your email marked as spam or blocked on the first try.
To build trust with ISPs, you need to “warm up” a domain and IP address over time. Part of the warm-up process requires that you initially send very few emails, and as you build your list, only send to the most engaged and active subscribers. These are people who opened your email in the last month, clicked through links, and/or purchased from you. If this kind of person receives your email and interacts positively, the mailbox provider will see your domain as legitimate and that the content inside is welcome.
Therefore, during the warm-up whether it’s a matter of days or weeks you’ll want to monitor key engagement metrics. Open rates, clicks, bounce rates, and spam complaint rates are all integral. Your first connection with subscribers sets the tone for your sender score. If things are going well, high interest, little to no spam complaints, and your audience does not flag you as spam, ISPs immediately begin to replicate the sending pattern they’ve learned and more of your subsequent emails will land in the inbox during the warm-up.
Similarly, during the warm-up, as your engagement metrics start to even out and trend positively over time, you’ll want to gradually increase your sending allowance. This should not be done all at once. Recommended is about a 100% increase every few days, but this is a generalization and can differ based upon audience engagement or content of the email. You should never skip the warm-up process or shave off days, however, because this incites ISPs to throttle and delay access/sending during the process or default sends to spam.
Ultimately, domain warm-up is not a one-time occurrence so no pressure, but keep it in the back of your mind. If you change your Email Service Provider for whatever reason, if you get a new IP address, if you decide to branch out with international domains or segmentation based on customer outreach, anytime you get a new sending domain it will require a warm-up. This is how you establish your sender reputation where it needs to be and where you want it for future purposes of deliverability.
Furthermore, domain warm-up is about as much quality as it is quantity. The emails sent during the warm-up process need to be needed by the subscribers, anticipated, relevant, and engaged. If you send anything that feels like a mass-mailed campaign blast, overly promotional effort, or something shocking to these individuals, your reputation will be destroyed before it even gets a chance to set in.
Therefore, warming up your domain is essential for the email marketing process to get in buyers’ inboxes now with a strong sender reputation already gained for future efforts. Warmed-up domains will be able to promote with ease and establish expected results instead of worrying every time about winding up in the spam folder.
Use a Reputable Email Service Provider
It’s all about the sender. Your sender is the software you use to generate emails; it will also impact deliverability. Reputable Email Service Providers (ESP) have deliverability monitoring, infrastructure, and compliance, and many offer IPs on a shared basis. Should yours be with one of the top ESPs, your IP will not get blacklisted because some other poor sender cannot play nice. You have nothing to fear if you’re a cheap, forgettable ESP client. Is it worth the gamble for the savings? Probably not. Most of the major increases do it all for you. They are good senders and good companies that always keep your deliverability in mind and updated for you, with changes to benefits.
Run Re-Engagement Campaigns Before Saying Goodbye
Not all inactive subscribers are gone for good. Some merely forget and require a nudge to jumpstart their original intent to subscribe. Send out re-engagement campaigns to see who might be interested to begin with. Allow them to reapportion their priorities, subscribe to specific content verticals, or let you know they’re just not interested in being on the list.
But if they’re not interested after several attempts to contact them, it’s better to part ways. Constantly emailing those who do not engage lowers your sender score and increases the likelihood of marking you as spam.
Continuously Test and Improve Your Campaigns
Email marketing is an ongoing process. The email landscape grows and changes all the time; new technology, legislation, and user interaction can all affect the efficacy of your email marketing campaigns. Always conduct A/B testing on subject lines, types of content, times sent, and frequency. This data informs you of what appeals to your audience, but it also helps you avoid red flags for spam detection.
Leverage notifications and real-time monitoring for deliverability. Some services evaluate how your email looks in different inboxes; distinction before they become severe, widespread issues is vital to ongoing enhancement. This means you’re always tuned in and set for success with optimization.
Final Thoughts: From Spam Folder to Inbox Success
Getting out of the spam folder is absolutely achievable but it takes a focused, deliberate approach. By focusing on authentication, list hygiene, content changes, and performance analytics, one can restore the traffic patterns to an email sender’s domain. The inbox is premium real estate, and the more efforts are honed, the easier it will be to achieve ideal engagement, improved relationships, and increased ROI. Make the effort to get it right. Your subscribers and your brand will appreciate it.