Why is my email going to spam?
Most of the time, it feels like a shrug. ˙\_(ツ)_/˙
Every email you send goes through a maze of delivery hurdles before it reaches its destination. Three factors affect whether someone receives your email in their inbox:
- infrastructure: Your identity and authentication records
- reputation: What recipients say about your sending domain and IP address
- content: What your message contains and how your subscribers have reacted to it in the past
If you’re struggling to solve the mystery of your email marketing program’s latest deliverability, you’re not alone. In fact, after analyzing thousands of emails, we found 70% of emails show at least one spam-related issue that may prevent them from reaching your inbox.
Let’s solve this problem.
I was chatting with two awesome email geek colleagues at Litmus, Jaina Mistry, Director of Brand and Content Marketing and Tracie Pang, Email Marketing Manager About each of the factors that make up your deliverability and what you can do if you end up in a spam folder:
1. Implement appropriate email authentication infrastructure
Even if you’ve already verified your email’s identity, you can start here.
“The benchmark for your ability to deliver is your authentication. If you are solving a deliverability issue, this is the first thing I would check. Make sure you have all the details sorted,” Jaina Mistry, Director of Brand and Content Marketing explain.
Email authentication basically tells the inbox provider that you are who you say you are. While they often have a reputation for “set it and forget it,” it’s worth double-checking that your infrastructure is in place. correct.
You have four different authentication methods available – we recommend using all three:
- Sender Policy Framework (SPF): SPF allows domain owners to specify multiple IP addresses or domains on whose behalf mail can be sent via DNS TXT entries. This way, the email provider knows that if an email is sent from your company’s domain or IP address, it’s coming from you.
- Domain Name Key Identified Mail (DKIM): DKIM allows your organization to claim responsibility for your emails by matching public and private keys (such as a digital signature) as part of the authentication process.
- Domain Message Validation and Reporting Consistency (DMARC): DMARC protects domains from phishing and spoofing attempts by defining how receiving inbox providers should handle messages that fail authentication checks.
- bonus: Brand Message Identification Index (BIMI): BIMI allows you to display the sender logo next to messages in your inbox after authenticating.
(FWIW, if you haven’t verified your email yet, New delivery rules for Gmail and Yahoo Meaning you will definitely end up in their spam folder. What is their first request? Use these security protocols to verify your identity).
What makes authentication frustrating is that, more often than not, email marketers are not the ones setting it up in the first place. “Most of the time, your infrastructure is set up by separate teams. But if an email becomes spam due to an infrastructure issue, the problem will go right back to the email marketing manager,” Mistry said.
For each of these authentication methods, make sure they are set up correctly and working properly before completely changing your email marketing strategy.
2. Manage your sender reputation
Authentication is one thing – you either set it up correctly or you don’t. But there are so many factors that affect a sender’s reputation that it can be difficult to pinpoint exactly what’s causing the problem.
Your email sender reputation is a score assigned to you by your inbox service provider (ISP). What determines sender reputation is a variety of factors that (naturally) vary from ISP to ISP. But generally it includes:
- The number of emails sent by your organization
- How many recipients marked your Email is considered spam or otherwise complain about your email
- How many Subscribers interact with emails From you (based on opens, clicks, replies, forwards, deletes, and unsubscribes.)
Let’s delve into each of these factors:
Sender reputation factor 1: Optimize your email cadence
The power of email marketing as a channel is that it is non-intrusive. This isn’t the love-to-hate in-your-face billboard, commercial, or pop-up.
Your subscribers have opted in to receive emails from you, which is already great! Respect that permission and take a hard look at your email marketing cadence. Are you sending too many emails?
Email cadence and deliverability have two aspects. The first is email volume, which refers to the total number of emails you send. “The dramatic increase in volume, typically 1,000 emails in a week and then 15,000 emails in a week, will make many ISPs think twice,” Mistry said.
But beyond big growth like this, it’s also about matching your subscribers’ needs to your business strategy. It’s one thing to heavily promote a big sale or once-a-year event, but if you make it a habit, your subscribers will give up.
When in doubt, ask unengaged subscribers what content they’d like to see as a separate email campaign directing them to your preference center. Here’s an example of one of our outlining regular newsletters and one-off campaigns we send to our subscribers.
Giving your subscribers control over what types of emails they receive and when they receive them can help set expectations and prevent future spam complaints.
“People expect you to always need to send email,” says email marketing manager Tracie Pang. “However, if you continue to send emails without engagement, it will affect your sender reputation. Sending emails to your list like this for multiple days in a row may result in more than one spam complaint because they get tired of it. Received your message.
Sender Reputation Factor 2: Minimizing Spam Complaints
Everyone loves to worry about unsubscribes, but spam complaints are more important to your deliverability. For example, to comply with Gmail and Yahoo’s deliverability rules, you must maintain a spam complaint rate of 0.3%, which means no more than 3 spam reports per 1,000 messages.
This is where deliverability becomes very fuzzy. Someone might flag you as spam for a variety of different reasons (some of which have nothing to do with you), so even if you’re a legitimate business sending genuine marketing emails, you’ll look like a spammer.
We’ve found that if subscribers can’t find the unsubscribe button, they will often mark you as spam. “Some spam complaints may come from not being able to unsubscribe easily,” Pang said. “You should have a one-click unsubscribe button to comply with Gmail and Yahoo, but also because it’s the best way to ensure someone doesn’t get frustrated and mark you as spam.”
Peng knows this frustration firsthand. Her spam folder was filled with text-only cold emails with no unsubscribe option. Not only is this illegal in some countries, super annoying. (You are welcome to copy this article and paste it to your sales colleagues. 🙄)
Ultimately, you have no control over whether someone marks you as spam. But you can control whether you want to send emails that your subscribers actually want to read. The more emails you send, and the more emails your subscribers open, click on, reply to, or otherwise engage with, the better your sender reputation will be.
Sender Reputation Factor 3: Increase Email Engagement
What really matters when it comes to deliverability is engagement, not the content itself. If you’re having trouble with spam filters, it might be time to check your email list and the types of engagement you’re seeing.
“If your content isn’t resonating, sometimes subscribers will just leave your email in their inbox and not engage at all. Unfortunately, unengaged emails can also impact your deliverability, Because now they appear in your list as inactive subscribers,” Pang said.
This is because spam filters prioritize user behavior over other factors, as their job is to protect users from being flooded with spam. “When it comes to spam filters, it’s more about user behavior,” Mistry said. “Yes, you want to get the authentication right and you want to make sure you’re sending great emails, but it also depends on what’s relevant to your subscribers and what they’re going to engage with.”
If you notice a lack of engagement, start with re-engagement activities. We typically send an email after a subscriber has been inactive for 60 days to give them a chance to fine-tune their emails before suspending them from our list.
But what’s the best way to increase email engagement? Send informative emails.
3. Send email content to subscribers think receive
For years, marketers have worried about whether specific words and phrases in subject lines or emails, or foreign languages, might accidentally trigger spam filters. Fortunately, today’s ISPs are more sophisticated (please pour out a copy when our emails are filtered) sexy return!
“Today, it’s less about the specific words you use and more about what recipients consider spam. So if you say “FREE” in all caps a million times, or if your email If the content is misleading, it will disappoint you,” Mistry said. “I once received an email with the subject line ‘FWD: Your flight has been cancelled’ and it totally panicked me. This kind of thing is just counterproductive.
That’s not to say you should suddenly add profanity or vulgarity to your emails if it doesn’t fit your brand. But what if the probiotic brand Seed could use “How is your poop?” as the subject line. Then you don’t have to worry about using the word “discount.”
Bad content has less to do with the specific words or phrases you use and more to do with how you use them and how your subscribers interact (or don’t interact) with your content.
- Know your audience: What do your subscribers care about? Why do they subscribe? What problems do they face? Use the answers to these questions to guide your email content.
- Content > Sales: Give your subscribers content they’re interested in, rather than just hitting them with sales pitches. Show your subscribers that you care about them and their needs and desires, not your own motives. This helps build brand trust (and, funnily enough, increases sales!).
- Think about a subscriber’s journey from start to finish: When building your emails and email marketing campaigns, consider not just the email, but how it fits into the context in which your subscribers interact with your brand. Where are they when they open the email, whether emotionally (I want problem X to be solved) or physically (mobile vs. desktop). From that email, where do they go next? What is the ultimate goal or action that you are driving for?
Building the best content can help you drive engagement and positive subscriber behaviors like clicks, opens, and our favorite, TINS (when a subscriber saves you from the spam folder by saying “This is not spam” hour).
“After you’ve spent so much time crafting the perfect email, if your subscribers don’t get a chance to see it, it could all be wasted,” Pang says. “It’s critical to stay on top of your email deliverability and make sure your emails actually reach your inbox.”
Learn why your emails end up in spam folders
Since there are so many factors that affect deliverability, when you’re struggling in your spam folder, it can be hard to know what you can do to fix the problem. Litmus Spam Test Scans over 20 different spam filters to let you know immediately what the problem is and provide you with the actionable recommendations you need to fix it before you hit send.
Kayla Voight
Kayla Voigt is a freelance writer
