How to Stop Your Marketing Emails From Going to Spam

Thomas Griffin September 3, 2020

Protecting users from unsolicited emails is something that email providers are highly focused on. If you’ve ever been frustrated by seeing irrelevant messages in your inbox then you know that it’s good news. But as a marketer, it’s also a cause for concern.

You’ll find that your hard-won email list is not getting all of your promotional content. The lower your email open rate is, the less likely you’ll get engagement or conversions. To help your business thrive, you need to take steps to make sure your email never ends up in spam.

And yes, you do have some degree of control and influence to make sure that your email makes it to your audience’s inbox, increasing the chances that they’ll engage with you.

Let’s look at how you can stop your email marketing messages from landing in the spam folder.

Before we get into the actionable steps you can take, the key thing you should keep in mind that subscriber engagement plays a powerful role in email filtering. Email providers like Google have complex algorithms that consider content, email source, and keywords to determine whether an email should arrive in the primary inbox. But it also looks at how people interact with an email and factors that in.

So, taking subscriber engagement and email marketing best practices into consideration, here are some ways to keep your emails out of the spam folder.

Use a reputable email marketing service provider

Did you know that your email could get marked as spam even if you never sent out spam before? Your emails go out to your audience through the servers of the email marketing service providers. If they’ve had other customers who sent spam and had their IP addresses marked because of it, you’ll get your mail tagged as spam too if it goes through the same IP address.

Make sure that you use only reputable providers. The top email marketing service providers have stringent procedures in place to prevent this from happening. So, you’ll avoid this situation by working with recognized email marketing platforms.

Optimize your content

If customers stop engaging with your content, then their email service’s algorithm will note this lack of interest. Eventually, your email will stop appearing in the primary inbox and could get sent to spam.

To avoid this, do the following:

• Optimize your subject lines to make it more attractive. Keep the subject statement short and make it emotionally provocative. IsItWP has an email subject analyzer tool that will give you a score as well as suggestions to make improvements
• Segment your email list so that you send personalized and relevant content to different groups
• Send your emails at the best times and days of the week
• Avoid spam trigger words. These are a list of words that trigger email filters to automatically mark an email as spam. Some of these words are ‘congratulations’, ‘dear friend’, and others. The previously mentioned analyzer tool will help identify such trigger words

Educate your subscribers

We’ll look at a few ways you can directly get your email subscribers to keep your emails from appearing in spam.

A simple but effective step that you can take is to ask your email subscribers to whitelist your emails. That means asking them to check if your email has arrived in the spam folder and to manually mark it as ‘Not Spam’.This action will be noted and users may even see a notification asking if all emails from your domain are to be allowed. Ask them to allow this.

Ask your users to manually move emails from the promotional folder to the main inbox. For Gmail users, a popup will appear and ask them if all future emails from this source should also be sent to the inbox. If they click ‘Yes’, your emails will arrive in your user’s main inbox.

You can also show your subscribers how to move your email, once they’ve read it, into a special folder for your content. Actions like these will inform email providers that your emails are desired and important to the user.

Avoid unethical practices

Never ever buy an email list or send cold emails to people. This is in violation of the CAN-SPAM ACT and can lead to a fine of up to $ 16,000.

Always get permission from your subscriber to send them emails. Create an optin form and send emails to your audience only if they have opted into getting a newsletter from you. To be doubly certain, you can send a confirmation email where users have to click a button to explicitly consent to receive your mail.

Never send misleading email subject lines or to present yourself as another person. Avoid creating content that creates fear and makes users believe that there is some risk involved if they don’t open your email.

Such activities are frowned upon and will have your emails marked as spam.

Conclusion

Ask for permission to send emails, send great content, and avoid unethical email marketing practices. These are some of the basic things you can do to keep your email out of the spam folder. Other helpful steps include using spam testing tools and working with SMTP tools to authenticate your email.

Email marketing is the best revenue-generating marketing activity you can carry out. And you can boost your inbox placement rate and open rates with the help of the suggestions here. So, don’t wait any longer. Take preventative steps and let email marketing boost your business growth.

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