No matter what type of business you have, email marketing needs to be a priority for your business.
In fact, according to hubspot, 86% of professionals use email for their business communication and 89% marketers recognized email as their primary channel for lead generation.
If you are investing time on email marketing campaign, you are on the right track.
But sometimes, you are not getting expected results. How come? Bombarding only promotional emails not necessarily be effective. Some of your emails might marked as spam.
In this guide, you can identify why your emails are going to spam and how to prevent that.
There are many things that putting your email in spam list. Find out the exact reason from below list which unables your emails to getting past the spam filters.
Let’s get started!
You are buying email list
One of the most important rules of email marketing is to get permission from the recipient. You should never, ever buy the email lists.
Even if the recipient who subscribed for the email from a brand are marking emails as spam.
In this case, if you are buying a list of emails and sending emails who have never signed up on your portal, there is even more possibility of getting marked as spam.
And by this, you’re putting yourself at risk of violating the CAN-SPAM Act and subject to penalties of up to $42,530.
Now think about the average person who works in an office and receives hundreds of emails each day. Do you really think they will waste their time reading unwanted messages?
Put yourself in their shoes for a while. If you are getting a promotional email from a brand you have never subscribed and never heard of, will you purchase anything from them? Mostly not.
Now you might have understood that why purchasing email list is not a good practice. Instead, you should focus on growing your email list by getting new subscribers.
Your IP address was used for spam
Even if you’re sending proper emails, you might be flagged as spam if your IP address is used by someone else for spam.
For example, if you are running your campaign through an email marketing service, your emails are getting delivered by their servers. Now if any other customer from same email marketing service sends spam emails, it could affect your deliverability as well.
So make sure to choose reputable service provider to get expected result.
You are using tricky subject lines
This is the biggest mistake people are doing to increase the email open rates.
Tricking your consumers can damage your brand reputation.
According to a research done by Litmus and Fluent, more than 50% of people felt cheated or tricked into opening a promotional email by misleading subject line.
Here are examples of some tricky subject lines:
- Did I leave my jacket at your place? – Everybody will think, recipient must be their friend or relative who visited them recently.
- “RE: CURRENTLY IN OFFICE” – It mostly appears to be work-related conversation and requires immediate attention due to it’s caps fonts.
- “Urgent – Update your information” – The word “urgent” itself triggers anyone to open the message quickly.
- “About your order” – Looks like a reminder for subscriber about the items of their shopping cart which is not bought yet.
If you are using such subject lines, your subscribers might get frustrated and make you spam.
You’re sending emails more frequently
As a business owner, you are thinking of your brand’s promotion 24*7.
Do you think that your consumers also having thoughts of your brand all day as you are thinking for them?
They must be thinking about other important things to do and they don’t want to hear from you frequently.
Promotional emails on a daily basis can disturb a person and they may mark you as spam. As a result, you can’t get your expected result.
Your “from” field address is inaccurate
Recipient must get a clear idea of from whom they are receiving the email.
Some business may have many email address for the different departments.
For example, sales team will have sales@yourdomain.com and support team will have support@yourdomain.com. Now if any person is getting an email from you, they can’t remember you.
Don’t change “from” information too often. The best practice is to mention a name in the “from” field that your subscribers are likely to remember. It can be the name of an individual or your company or a combo of both (e.g. Ishita from Elan).
Your physical address is missing
Your email must include your valid physical postal address. It can be your current street address, a post office box you’ve registered with the U.S. Postal Service, or a private mailbox you’ve registered with a commercial mail receiving agency established under Postal Service regulations.
You didn’t include an “opt out” link
Make sure to give an “unsubscribe” link to your subscribers in every email.
Your content must be very valuable in your vision but it’s not mandatory that your subscribers also have the same taste as yours. So you have to give them a way out.
For that, you can include an unsubscribe link at the bottom of your email.
Also, when they ask to be removed, you need to process that request within 10 business days. You can’t charge a fee, ask any personal information beyond an email address, or make them do any other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on a website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request.
If you want to know the reason for unsubscription, you can request your unsubscriber to fill a form right after they have opted out.
Once people have told you they don’t want to receive more messages from you, you can’t sell or transfer their email addresses, even in the form of a mailing list.
You have used spam trigger words
Spam filters are triggered by some specific words in subject line or body of the email.
Spam trigger words can be in the form of symbols, numerals, alphabets or combination of it. Hubspot have listed spam trigger words. Here are some examples:
$$$
100% free
Amazing
Cancel at any time
Congratulations
Dear
Free gift
Guaranteed
Limited time
No cost
Opportunity
Offer expires
Save up to
Your email service provider may have a built-in tool which checks your emails for spam trigger words before sending it. If you are running campaign by yourself then you can use free tools like ISnotSPAM which scores your emails for deliverability and to see if they are likely to trigger spam filters.
You are not sharing relevant content
Your subscribers are not interested in your casual greetings or a gentle reminder that your company is still exist.
So before sending an email make sure you are sharing a valuable content to your subscribers.
While sending your next email, ask yourself these questions:
- Am I sharing new or urgent information with my recipients?
- When was the last time I sent an email about this topic? Is it too soon to send another update?
- Do all of my subscribers need to know this information or does only a segment of my list need to be updated?
- If I received this email would I find it valuable?
If you have clear answers for these questions then you can send the email.
You are not cleaning your email list
A metric that spam filtering algorithms are using to catch errant emails is to look at the number of active email accounts you have on your list. If the percentage is too low, then that can be a sign that you are sharing spammy email.
You have to remove inactive email accounts on a regular basis to prevent your email from going to spam.
Inactive email accounts are those which haven’t been used since long or very rarely used. It’s probably safe to remove them from your list.
If you are mailing to a large number of inactive email accounts, that’s a red flag to spam filters.
It’s a great practice to focusing on email marketing campaign but only if it’s done in a correct way.
Unfortunately, there is no specific formula that guarantees your emails won’t goes in spam list.
By paying attention on a subject lines, cleaning email lists, looking after spam triggers, sharing a relevant content, you can preserve your credibility and protect your IP address from ever getting blacklisted.
If you can identify why your emails are going to spam folder, you can solve the problem and generate the leads.
