With so much of our communication happening over email, spam filters are truly a blessing. Otherwise, our email inboxes would’ve been inundated with unsolicited emails. Not only would it have been a hassle to manually remove them, but accidentally opening a spammy email could potentially lead to a security breach.
However, a lot of times emails with useful content might also get sent into the spam folder by these spam filters. This could be due to several reasons, including errors in design and copywriting.
In this article, we’ll take a look at reasons why your emails might get flagged as spam by recipient email servers, and what measures you can take to avoid that.
Offer a double opt-in
Providing a double opt-in process for email subscribers is vital for building a quality mailing list. This way you get two confirmations that an individual is genuinely interested in receiving your emails.
Start off by collecting emails from prospects through sign-up forms on your website or through a landing page. In the sign-up form, explain the purpose of your emails and the type of content to expect.
Whenever a sign-up form is submitted, automatically send a confirmation email to the provided email address. The confirmation email should contain a unique verification link or a confirmation button for the user to click on to confirm their subscription. Convey to the subscribers that they must confirm their subscription to be a part of your mailing list.
Authenticate your email
Authenticate your email to reduce the likelihood of your emails being flagged as spam or rejected by recipient email servers. When your domain is authenticated, recipient servers can trust that your emails are legitimate, which increases the chances of them reaching the inbox rather than being filtered into the spam folder.
You can use the following three methods to authenticate your email:
- Sender Policy Framework (SPF) allows domain owners to specify which mail servers are authorized to send emails on behalf of their domain.
- DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) adds a digital signature to each outgoing email, allowing the recipient's mail server to verify its authenticity.
- Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) builds on SPF and DKIM to provide additional controls and reporting capabilities.
Implementing these authentication protocols requires access to your domain's DNS settings and configuration changes to your email server or email-sending platform. Depending on your technical expertise, you may need assistance from your IT team, email service provider, or DNS hosting provider to configure and maintain these authentication mechanisms.
Follow email design best practices
A small error in email design or copy might not get your emails flagged as spam, but a combination of these errors will attract the attention of spam filters.
Here are some email design best practices to ensure that your emails don’t end up in the spam folder:
- Add complete sender information to your emails. Include your physical address and accurate sender information (i.e., the email address that you’re sending emails from matches the sender and authentication information).
- Keep the image-to-text ratio low. You shouldn’t rely on a single large image or lots of small images. Use text/HTML instead of including everything in images.
- Avoid using words that could trigger spam filters, e.g., “guaranteed”, “free” or “100%”.
- Use correct grammar and spelling. Spam filters can react to strange-sounding sentences and incorrectly spelled words.
- Avoid using too many emojis, exclamation marks, “$” signs, and special symbols.
- Don’t use too many uppercase letters, especially in the subject line.
- Don’t add too many attachments to your emails. As attachments are often used by hackers and scammers for malicious activity, too many attachments can trigger spam filters.
Create smaller mailing lists
Instead of mailing the same content to your entire mailing list, create smaller lists based on customer interests you know based off the information they provided when signing up for your emails.
Here's an example: If you're running a gardening and landscaping business, chances are your landscaping clients may not be interested in your gardening services, and vice versa. In this case, you will get better customer engagement if you send separate emails, one for your gardening services clients and the other for your landscaping clients.
Sending an email that talks about different unrelated topics may tune out the customer just by viewing the subject line.
Ask subscribers to whitelist your emails
To stop crucial emails from ending up in your spam folder, consider adding or whitelisting the email addresses we use to communicate with you. Here are the email addresses we use to communicate with you:
- For general alerts (download orders, updates): general@alerts.postermywall.com
- For marketing emails: hello@marketing.postermywall.com
- For support and troubleshooting related queries: support@postermywall.com
Consult the following articles to add PosterMyWall’s contact emails to your preferred email’s contact list, so you don’t miss out on any emails:
Allow people to unsubscribe
If your emails include quality and useful content, your subscribers will definitely want to keep receiving them. Nonetheless, they should have the option to unsubscribe from your emails if they want. Hence, you should add a link or button for unsubscribing in your emails to convey to your subscribers that you respect their choices.
This is also an essential step for avoiding the spam folder. This way when a subscriber no longer wants to receive emails from you, they will simply opt out of your mailing list instead of reporting you as spam.
PosterMyWall’s Email Maker simplifies this for you by adding an unsubscribe button in all the email campaigns you create and automatically taking care of requests from your audience to opt out of mailing lists.
Regularly clean your mailing list
While some people who aren’t interested in your emails and don’t wish to receive them might unsubscribe from your mailing list, others might ignore your emails or mark them as spam.
This is harmful to your sender reputation, making your emails less likely to reach recipients' inboxes, including those that actively engage with your emails.
Regular maintenance of your mailing list helps prevent low engagement and its impact on the deliverability rates of your emails. Remove the emails from your list from which you get little engagement or bounced emails.
Do not buy email lists no matter what. Sending emails to purchased email lists bring down engagement as the recipients never opted for your emails. Purchased lists also contain spam trap addresses which can kill your reach, forcing you to start over.
Final thoughts
If your emails provide value to the subscribers, they would be interested in receiving and engaging with your emails. You just have to convey to their email service providers that your emails are legitimate.
By following the tips mentioned in this article, you can ensure that your emails land in the inboxes of recipients instead of their spam folders.