Email marketing : Guide On How to Prevent Emails from Going to Spam

I am sure you have encounter frequently and always ask the annoying question “why are my emails going to spam?”. It would be a shame for all the hard work you put into crafting your emails to go to waste, but that is exactly what happens when your email ends up in a subscriber’s spam folder. 

When you are putting together an email marketing campaign, statistics like this are alarming. We do not want your emails to be just another statistic, and we have written the following guide to help you keep your emails out of the junk folder and in your recipient’s inbox where they belong. Here we are here with our guide to explain how to stop your emails from going to spam with some tips & tricks on how to avoid spam filters.

1. Request your recipients to whitelist your email address

Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! ensure that their email program spam filters do not catch emails that come from people in your contacts. They assume that if an email is from someone in your contacts, it is not spam.

To ensure that your emails get this privileged treatment, ask your subscribers or recipients to whitelist your emails by adding your “From” address to their contacts or list of safe senders. We recommend including instructions and screenshots illustrating how to do this, as you should not assume that all of your subscribers have the technical proficiency to whitelist emails.

To ensure that all your emails get this treatment, include the whitelisting instructions in the first welcome email you send when someone joins your email list.

2. Always Get Permission to Send Emails

Nothing will get your emails identified as spam faster than sending an email without permission. Just think about what you do when you get an email from an unfamiliar sender. Assuming the email even makes it through your email service’s spam filter, you are going to mark it as spam without even opening it.

Sending people marketing emails without their permission is not a recipe for success in the long-term. If you want to persuade subscribers to buy from you, you want them to be engaged and interested. Always get permission before sending an email; it is the best practice both ethically and commercially.

3. Follow the regulations on email marketing

Speaking of ethics, you need to be conscious of the laws that govern digital marketing communications. Specifically, you should be familiar with the CAN-SPAM Act, which outlines the practices you must adopt when sending emails commercially.

You should know that there are harsh penalties for sending spam emails. How do you identify if an email is a spam? The CAN-SPAM Act defines spam email as any message which you:

• Send without the recipient’s permission.
• Send without including a mailing address.
• Send with a misleading subject line.
• Send without including a way for recipients to opt-out.

All modern email marketing programs ensure that you comply with the mailing address and opt-outs by default. But you should be careful about your subject titles and contents, which we will dive in further later. 

4. Use reputable email marketing program

One indication that spam filters trigger when trying to screen messages is to look at the IP address associated with the sending email address and see if there are any spam complaints associated with it. If there are, then legitimate email addresses will likely get flagged.

To ensure this does not happen to your emails, always use a reputable email provider. All the top providers take steps to prevent spammers from using their platforms, which helps ensuring malicious actions of spammers do not hurt the deliverability of your emails.

Furthermore, the best email marketing software providers will also have features built in to help you avoid other common spam triggers such as not including a physical address or using a sending email address that looks suspicious.

5. Proofread your Emails

If your emails are riddled with typos, grammatical errors, and sentences that just sound a little off or does not make any sense, then there are risks that spam filters will stop them. While you are not going to write an email with problems to this extent, it does offer valuable lessons about how typos, poor formatting, and bad grammar are all indications of spam emails. If you are not comfortable with your grammar abilities, find someone you trust to proofread emails for you, or at least use a program such as Grammarly to catch basic grammar errors.

6. Avoid writing spammy titles or subjects

In the past there were specific lists of “spam trigger words” to avoid in your marketing emails. Today, spam filters are much more sophisticated. Therefore, instead of focusing on specific words to avoid, it is best to think more thoroughly and ensure that you do not write subject lines that sounded like spam.

Due to the wording the email marketers at these companies chose, the emails always ended up in spam. Avoid your emails from making references to money, use too many exclamation points, or generally promise discounts. Does not mean that you cannot write emails containing discounts or promotions, just be extra careful at title and subject selection.

7. Purge inactive email addresses 

One of metric that spam filters use to catch errant emails is to look at how many of the emails to which you are sending are active. If the percentage is too low, then that can be a indication that you are sending spam email content.

To ensure this does not happen, you should regularly remove addresses associated with email accounts that do not appear to be active. If someone has not opened your emails in a long time, then it is probably safe to remove them from your list. 

Definitely, this guide only applies if a small number of your subscribers are not engaging with your content. If you have low email open rates overall, then you may need to rethink your overall email marketing strategy, as this could indicate a deeper issue than just a few inactive email addresses.

8. Use spam-checking tool

There are few spam-checking tools available based on regions. Utilize the tool, simply send your email to their provided email address in order to automatically receive a report on how likely your email is to go to a recipient’s spam folder.

9. Have clear sender address

Your sender address is what appears in the “From” field when someone looks at your email. If you have a sender address full of random characters or that just sounds suspicious, you run the risk of your email getting flagged as spam.

For this reason, we recommend avoiding sender addresses that contain lots of numbers or gibberish. Stick to either a person’s name or your company name. Not only is this helpful for keeping you out of spam, but it is also more personal than a string of random characters, which people have come to associate with automatic emails, not compelling, personalized offers.

10. Email your subscribers regularly

Do not let your subscriber forget who you are. Stay in regular contact with your subscribers. Keep them in check of your latest happenings or promotions. Of course, you should always provide value when you send an email; do not just email subscribers with a certain frequency because it is obliged to do so.

Rather, look for opportunities to provide value to your subscribers as often as you can. Once a week, that is fine, as long you email them consistently each week (and use smart timing to make sure they get the emails when they’re most likely to open them). By doing that, you can avoid your subscribers to opt-out or unsubscribed, or mark your emails as spam when you engage with them again. 

11. Include option to opt-out

Making it easy for your subscribers to leave your email list might sound like a bad suggestion, but it is key to both advantages, complying with the CAN-SPAM Act and ensuring that subscribers to trust you. While complying with the law is your foremost priority, including a way to unsubscribe also shows subscribers that you have confidence in the value of your content. 

How simple you make it to unsubscribe is up to you. Some brands take the confidence approach to the extreme, placing an unsubscribe button in the header as well as the footer of their emails. While you can do this, there is also the risk that people will either unsubscribe without reading the email or hit the button by mistake. Therefore, we think that a standard unobtrusive unsubscribe button in the email footer is the best approach. 

12. Be Honest

We already mentioned how the CAN-SPAM Act forbids sending deceptive emails, but the point warrants more study. Above all, you should always be honest in your email marketing. Do not write subject lines that trick people into opening your messages. Specifically, do not write things that make emails look like they are from a person’s employer, subject lines that are threatening or alarming, or email addresses that appear to be from someone they are not. Resorting to such trickery is not the way to run a business. Instead, focus on how you can create value for your subscribers. 

We hope now you understand what causes emails to end up in spam, as well as what you can do to avoid them from going there. As long as you follow the best practices we have outlined above, you can rest assured that the emails you send will wind up in your subscribers’ inboxes, and not buried in the junk mail folder.