Professionals sending email campaigns spend most of their time understanding how to avoid spam filters, but sometimes they miss some general best practices that guide their emails into spam filters.
We all know that spam filters are getting smarter, and how to combat them is getting more challenging, but don’t worry, we got that covered for you.
This blog will briefly walk you through the essential factors you need to pay attention to avoid email spam filters.
There is no reason to worry when you are genuine and have no intention of spamming. However, few casualties must be avoided, and care must be taken to avoid spam filters when running an email marketing campaign.
What Is Spam?
Spam or junk email is an unsolicited email sent in bulk to people who did not consent to receive them to promote, spread malicious software, or phish.
The key features of spam email are:
- Bright email body with lots of colors, pictures, and fonts
- Anonymous sender
- Spammy subject line
- Multiple links
- Irrelevant or suspicious attachments
- Unsolicited
- Asking for suspicious actions or information
- Bulk sending (more than ten recipients)
- Invisible headers
- Poor grammar and spelling
These points can affect your ability to supply email; however, there’s more to how emails end up in the spam folder than poor attachments and poor grammar. So let’s take a closer look.
What Are Spam Filters?
Spam filters detect virus-infected emails, as well as unwanted messages (collectively called spam or junk), and block them from reaching your email inbox. To do this, spam filters monitor many signals to assess which emails are valid.
Statistics show that 92.6% of all emails sent were classified as spam in 2008. This figure has dropped significantly due to spam filters and regulations such as the GDPR, but spam still accounted for 28.5% of all emails last year.
When considering spam filters, we tend to think of bad actors, actual junk, and malicious email as phishing attacks (disguising a fraudulent email as a trustworthy entity in an attempt to obtain sensitive information). However, it’s possible that your emails can get flagged as spam, even if you’re not a spammer.
Why Emails Go to Spam Instead of Inbox
Globally, electronic mail has an inbox placement rate of around 83%, which is fine. However, this means that about 1 in 6 emails are sent in the spam or blocked entirely for your subscriber inbox.
And you might think 83% is pretty good. But here’s a question:
Will you be able to achieve only 83% of your earning potential? For example, if you knew you could make $100,000 this year, would you be okay with bringing in $83,000?
Because when we talk about your email being spam, we’re talking about something else:
If your emails go to your customers’ inboxes, you’re missing out on the benefits you could have earned. That’s why you need to look into why emails get spammed in the first place. Otherwise, you are leaving revenue needlessly on the table.
A big reason your email is spam is that spam filtering has become more stringent over the years.
Electronic mail service providers like Yahoo and Google are cracking down on spam to serve their customers better. The problem is that the filtering process is not 100% accurate. It means that legit emails sometimes get spammed as well.
But there is another side to this story that you should be aware of:
Connecting with customers plays a huge role in email delivery. So your email service provider looks at your engagement levels and recipient behavior when deciding which emails make it to the inbox, and which go to spam. Here are five ways to prevent your emails from going to spam.
1. Create A Unique Subject Title
In your email header, include something unique to the recipient that is unlikely to be in a spam message. Examples might consist of your company’s name, the name of your target competitor, or the name of the target person.
2. Watch What You Say
Spam filters analyze your content. Unfortunately, there are no magic keywords to improve deliverability, but limiting the use of dangerous keywords – such as free, buy, promo, etc. – reduces the chances of your email getting into the spam folder.
Moreover:
- Only link to legitimate sites with respectable domains.
- Don’t go crazy with the email size (30KB is OK.)
- Balance the image-to-text ratio.
- Host your images in trusted services.
3. Don’t Buy or Rent Email Lists
Yes, you can legally rent and buy a list of people who agree to email communications – but it’s never a good idea. Not only is this a dirty email marketing tactic that violates the terms of service for your email service provider, but these people don’t know you – and it’s possible they won’t want your emails either. There is a good chance that they will mark you as spam. Also, let’s be honest… high-quality email addresses are never for sale.
4. Don’t Email People Who Have Bounced Repeatedly
A hard bounce results from an invalid closed or non-existent email address, and such emails can’t be successfully delivered. Bounce rates are one of the major factors used by Internet service providers (ISPs) to determine an email sender’s reputation, so too many bounces can cause them to stop allowing your email in people’s inboxes.
5. Always Get Permission to Send Emails
Nothing will flag your email as spam faster than sending an unauthorized email. So think about what you do when you receive an email from an unknown sender. Assuming the email even makes it through your email service’s spam filter, you’re going to mark it as spam without even opening it.
Sending marketing emails to people without their permission is not a recipe for long-term business success. If you want to persuade customers to buy from you, you want them to be engaged and interested. Random email recipients are neither; they are most likely disinterested and more likely to get annoyed at receiving an email from someone they don’t know. Therefore, always get permission before emailing; This is an ethical and economic best practice.
Conclusion
Avoiding spam filters and getting your campaigns inboxed isn’t usually top of mind for most marketers. Yet, it significantly impacts the results you get from your campaigns and gives your brand an advantage over your competitors.
So as you go about implementing your email marketing initiatives, consider some of the tips presented in this guide. Send consent-based email lists, send relevant, engaging campaigns and configure your account to send from your business.
Doing so will boost your open and click-through rates for that email and send a positive sign to email providers that will help ensure that all campaigns you send to your customers are landing in the inbox.