Why Emails Get Spammed and How to Fix It
Did you know that According to Radicati Research Group, more than 250 billion emails are sent every day and more than 20% of all business letters are detected as spam?
Email marketing is one of the most affordable and effective types of marketing. But its effectiveness is reduced if your mailing list ends up in spam. In this article, we’ll take a look at how to properly work with email marketing tools to get your emails delivered to your subscribers.
Why do emails end up in spam?
More often than not, mailings end up in spam because of just a few settings. It doesn’t take too long for you to make adjustments to your domain records, and the chances of your emails ending up in your Inbox will increase dramatically.
Filters. The easiest way to get an email into the spam folder is through the individual recipient filters. The recipient may have previously marked similar emails from other senders as spam, so the provider automatically sent your mailing the same way. If all emails end up in spam, the problem might be caused by the sender’s settings. You need to check them – perhaps the problem will be solved quickly.
SPF is not configured. Sender Policy Framework contains a complete list of IP addresses from which it is allowed to send email campaigns on behalf of the domain. After you set up your SPF record, your email providers will know that you sent the email from your company’s domain. After all, there are many cases when attackers sent mailings from foreign domains to steal personal data.
DKIM settings. DomainKeys Identified Mail is a record that confirms the permission of the domain owner to mail. In mail services, the DKIM key is generated automatically; if you submit it yourself, you have to create it manually. This can be done using special services.
DMARC settings. DMARC (Domain Message Authentication, Reporting, and Compliance) helps to identify, report, and resolve messages by the domain name. DMARC are rules specifying what to do if SPF and/or DKIM generated an error or message for any technical reason suspicious to the recipient’s server. First of all – if scammers try to send letters on behalf of your domain or your IP address.
Double Opt-in. Double opt-in involves a subscription and its confirmation. This approach helps prevent incorrect addresses and addresses of disinterested subscribers from being included in the mailing list. First, users enter their email and other data in the subscription form, and then they receive e-mail trigger letters asking to confirm the subscription.
Domain and IP address not warmed up. It is easy for spammers to get a new IP address, so email providers distrust mailings from “clean” addresses. If you sent only personal letters and then decided to send mailings to the entire subscriber base, the likelihood of getting into spam will be very high. Mail providers will suspect that attackers have hacked your site and started sending spam messages. Warming up the IP address creates a positive reputation for the sender based on the history of e-mails. Make mailings through trusted email services that take care of the reputation of your server’s IP address. This will reduce the likelihood of being scammed.
To avoid such situations, you need to “warm up” your subscriber base. It looks like this:
- In the early days, send a small number of letters. Don’t send 500 emails a day. At the same time, do not make sending instant – stretch it for several hours.
- Constantly increase your email volume by about 20-25%.
- Send emails every day except weekends
- Analyze delivery, open, click and click rates daily. If the numbers change for the worse, reduce your daily email volume again.
Deliverability is a key metric in email marketing. After all, if your mailings get into spam, their effectiveness is extremely low.
How to prevent emails from getting into spam:
- Set up a postmaster. Such a tool is available from popular mail providers, it is designed to analyze mailings. Allows you to find out the deliverability statistics, identify problems and errors in sending, and track the dynamics of key indicators.
- Format your letters correctly. Indicate the topic. Don’t write it in capital letters – this will repel recipients. Don’t make the topic too long, just a few words
- When designing your email marketing strategy and writing emails, always think about sending the user the right newsletter at the right time. There is no universal frequency, it depends on the business niche.
- Send letters from a corporate address, try not to change the sender’s name.
- Track your deliverability rate regularly with reports from your email marketing service or postmaster. If more than 2% of emails end up in spam, check the SPF and DKIM settings, and clear your base of inactive subscribers.
In this article, we have described the key points of anti-spam settings. However, more factors affect deliverability. Every day SPAM filters improve their technologies, so it will become more and more difficult for you to ensure that your email does not end up in spam. You will not necessarily be sent to SPAM because of one mistake, but if you have a lot of unfilled boxes in our checklist, you are at a higher risk.
