How to Keep Your Emails From Going to Spam

Why did my email go to spam?

Most of the time, it feels like a big ‘ol shrug.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Every email you send goes through a maze of deliverability obstacles before it reaches its destination. Three factors influence whether or not someone receives your email in the inbox:

1. Infrastructure: Your identification and authentication records
2. Reputation: The receiver’s rating of your sending domain and IP addresses
3. Content: What your message contains and how your subscriber has reacted to it in the past

If you’re struggling to solve the latest deliverability mystery for your email marketing program, you’re not alone. In fact, after analyzing thousands of emails, we found that 70% of emails show at least one spam-related issue that could keep them from reaching the inbox.

Let’s fix that.

I chatted with two of my amazing email geek colleagues here at Litmus, Director of Brand and Content Marketing Jaina Mistry and Email Marketing Manager Tracie Pang about each of these factors that make up your deliverability and what you can do if you’re stuck in the spam folder:

1. Implement proper email authentication infrastructure

Even if you’ve already authenticated your emails, start here.

“The baseline for your deliverability is your authentication. It’s the first thing I would check if you’re troubleshooting deliverability issues. Make sure you have all of your details sorted,” says Jaina Mistry, Director Brand and Content Marketing.

Email authentication basically tells inbox providers that you are who you say you are. While they generally have a reputation for “set it and forget it,” it’s worth double-checking that your infrastructure is in place. correctly.

You have four different authentication methods available—we recommend using all three:

• Sender Policy Framework (SPF): SPF allows a domain owner to indicate multiple IP addresses or domains that can send mail on their behalf via a DNS TXT entry. This way, mailbox providers know that if it’s sent from your company’s domain or IP address, that it’s from you.
• DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM): DKIM allows your organization to claim responsibility for your email as part of the authentication process by matching a public and private key, like a digital signature.
• Domain Message Authentication and Reporting Conformance (DMARC): DMARC protects a domain from being used in phishing and spoofing attempts by defining how receiving inbox providers should handle messages that fail an authentication check.
• BONUS: Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI): BIMI allows you to display a sender logo alongside your messages in the inbox after completing authentication.

(FWIW, if you haven’t authenticated your emails, Gmail and Yahoo’s new deliverability rules mean you’re guaranteed to land in their spam folders. Their first requirement? Using these security protocols to verify your identity).

What makes authentication frustrating is that often, email marketers aren’t the ones setting it up in the first place. “Most of the time, your infrastructure is set up by a separate team. But if the email goes to spam because of an infrastructure issue, that’s going to come right back to the email marketing manger,” says Mistry.

For each one of these authentication methods, make sure they’re set up correctly and that they’re working before completely changing up your email marketing strategy.

2. Manage your sender reputation

Authentication is one thing—you either have it set up correctly or you don’t. But so many factors go into your sender reputation that it can be challenging to isolate exactly what’s causing the problem.

Your email sender reputation is a score provided to you by an inbox service provider (ISP). What determines your sender reputation is a mix of factors that (naturally) varies by ISP. Generally, though, it includes:

• The number of emails your organization sends
• How many recipients mark your emails as spam or otherwise complain about your emails
• How many subscribers engage with emails from you (based on actions like open, click, reply, forward, delete, and unsubscribe.)

Let’s dig into each one of these factors:

Sender reputation factor 1: Optimize your email cadence

What makes email marketing work as a channel is that it’s not interruptive. It’s not the in-your-face billboards, ads, or pop-ups people love to hate.

Your subscribers chose to receive emails from you—that’s already great! Treat that permission with respect and take a hard look at your email marketing cadence. Are you sending too many emails?

There are two sides to email cadence with deliverability. The first is email volume, which refers to the number of emails overall that you send. “A sharp increase in volume, where you usually send 1,000 emails in a single week, and then one week you send 15,000 is going to make a lot of ISPs look twice,” says Mistry.

But beyond a large volume jump like that, it’s also about matching the needs of your subscribers with your business tactics. It’s one thing to heavily promote a big sale or a once-a-year event, but if you make a habit of it, your subscribers will just tune out.

When in doubt, ask your unengaged subscribers what they want to see as a separate email campaign directing them to your preferences center. Here’s an example of ours, which outlines both our regular newsletters and one-off campaigns that we send out to our subscribers.

Giving your subscribers control over what kinds of emails they receive and when they receive them can help set expectations and prevent future spam complaints.

“There’s this expectation that you always need to send an email,” says Email Marketing Manager Tracie Pang. “But if you’re continuing to send emails without engagement, it’s going to affect your sender reputation. Sending to your list multiple days in a row like that could lead to more than one spam complaint because they’re tired of hearing from you.”

Sender reputation factor 2: Minimize spam complaints

Everyone loves to worry about unsubscribes, but it’s spam complaints that matter more for your deliverability. To comply with Gmail and Yahoo’s deliverability rules, for example, you must maintain a spam complaint rate of 0.3%, or no more than three spam reports for every 1,000 messages.

This is where deliverability gets really fuzzy. Someone could mark you as spam for a whole bunch of different reasons—some of which have nothing to do with you—so that even though you’re a legitimate business sending real marketing emails, you look like a spammer.

We’ve found that subscribers often mark you as spam if they can’t find the unsubscribe button. “Some spam complaints could come from not having an easy unsubscribe,” says Pang. “You should have a one-click unsubscribe button to comply with Gmail and Yahoo, but also because it’s the best way to make sure someone isn’t just marking you as spam out of frustration.”

Pang experiences that frustration first-hand. Her spam folder is full of plain text-style cold emails without an unsubscribe option. Not only is this illegal in certain countries, it’s super annoying. (Feel free to copy and paste this article to your colleagues in sales. 🙄)

Ultimately, you can’t control whether or not someone will mark you as spam. But you can control whether or not you’re sending emails that your subscribers actually want to read. The more you can send emails that your subscribers open, click, reply, or otherwise engage with, the better off your sender reputation will be.

Sender reputation factor 3: Increase email engagement

It’s engagement, more than the content itself, that really matters when it comes to deliverability. If you’re struggling with the spam filter, it may be time to take a look at your email list and what kind of engagement you’re seeing.

“If your content doesn’t resonate, then sometimes subscribers will just leave your emails sitting in their inbox and won’t engage at all. And unfortunately, unengaged emails can also affect your deliverability because now they’re sitting in your list as inactive subscribers,” says Pang.

That’s because spam filters prioritize user behavior over other factors, since their job is to protect their users from being inundated with spam. “When it comes to spam filters, it’s much more about user behavior,” says Mistry. “Yes, you want to get your authentication right, and you want to make sure you’re sending great emails, but it also comes back to what’s relevant to your subscribers, and what they’re going to engage with.”

A great place to start if you’re finding a lack of engagement is with a re-engagement campaign. We typically send one after 60 days of no engagement for our subscribers, giving them a chance to fine-tune their emails before suspending them from our list.

But the best way to increase your email engagement? Send emails with great content.

3. Send email content subscribers want to receive

For years, marketers worried over specific words and phrases in their subject lines or emails, or whether or not foreign languages would accidentally trip a spam filter. Luckily, ISPs are much more sophisticated today (pour one out for the time one of our emails got filtered for bringing sexy back!)

“Today it’s less about specific words you use and more about what looks spammy to the recipient. So if you’re saying ‘FREE’ in all caps a million times or if you’re misleading with your email content, that’s what’s going to drag you down,” says Mistry. “I once got an email that had a subject line of ‘FWD: Your flight has been canceled,’ and it made me totally panic. That type of thing is only going to backfire on you.”

That’s not to say you should suddenly pepper your emails with swears or racy references if it doesn’t fit your brand. But if probiotic brand Seed can lead with the subject line, “How’s your poop?” then you don’t have to agonize over using the word “discount.”

Poor content has less to do with the specific words or phrases you use and is rather about how you use them, and how your subscribers engage with your content (or don’t.) Focusing on great content means:

• Knowing your audience: What do your subscribers care about? Why did they subscribe? What issues are they facing? Use the answers to these questions to guide your email’s content.
• Content > Sales: Provide your subscribers with content that is of interest to them, rather than just hammering them with sales messages. Show your subscribers that you care about them and their needs and wants, rather than your own motives. This helps build brand trust (and funnily enough, more sales!).
• Thinking about the subscriber journey from start to finish: Build your emails and email campaigns thinking not just about that email, but how it fits into the context of your subscribers’ interaction with your brand. Where are they as they open the email, both emotionally (I wish X problem was solved) and physically (mobile vs. desktop). From that email, where do they go next? What’s the ultimate goal or action you’re driving?

Building the best content you can helps you boost engagement and positive subscriber behavior like clicks, opens, and our favorite, TINS (when subscribers rescue you from the spam folder by saying, “This is not spam.”) Keeping your content helpful, rather than salesy, is the best way to keep your content from being spammy.

“After you’ve spent so much time crafting your perfect email, it can all go to waste if your subscribers don’t get a chance to see it,” says Pang. “It’s crucial to stay on top of your email deliverability and make sure your emails are actually landing in the inbox.”

Find out why your emails land in the spam folder

With so many different factors influencing your deliverability, it’s difficult to know what you can do to fix it when you’re struggling with the spam folder. Litmus Spam Testing scans 20+ different spam filters to give you the immediate insight into what’s going wrong—and the actionable advice you need to fix it before you hit send.

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Kayla Voigt

Kayla Voigt is a freelance writer