Imagine seeing an email campaign that took days or weeks of hard work and team efforts, landing in the spam folder of the target audience, it’s heartbreaking, isn’t it?
Well, in the era of email marketing, there are three types of emails – one that lands directly into the inbox, one that bounces back and another that lands in the spam folder. Though we don’t like it, the latter often happens when we send marketing emails to prospective customers.
Achieving a 100% Inbox Placement Rate seems impossible with cold emails. According to the reports of validity, the average IPR of Gmail in 2023 is 88.1% with 11.9% of the emails either getting spammed or missing.
If you are tired of your legitimate emails going into the spam folder, this article is for you. This article will provide tips on how to stop emails from going into spam.
How Spam Deliveries Impact You?
Your e-mails going into the spam folder not only affect your outreach but can also cripple your entire sales campaign. When your e-mails are flagged spam, it becomes difficult to reach out to your prospective customer’s inbox and can result in lower response rates.
Spam deliveries can impact your business in the following ways:
Low Deliverability: Once flagged as spam only a few of your e-mails reach the prospect’s inbox and the chances of your content being read are less.
Lower Engagement Rates: Spam deliveries often bring down customer engagement and important emails go unread by your prospects.
Lost Leads: With essential e-mails being filtered into spam, prospective leads may go cold and the chances of conversion may also lessen.
As a result, you may see lower conversion rates and a slowed sales cycle.
How Does Spam Filters Operate In Gmail?
Gmail’s spam filter uses a combination of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning to analyze factors to block and filter out unwanted content from reaching the receiver’s inbox. Here’s how the spam filter works:
Your Domain Reputation
The first thing that Gmail’s algorithm checks is whether your domain and IP address is blacklisted or not.
Email Content
Secondly, the spam filter checks the content of the email for any malicious links or spammy words.
User Action
Once your email passes the initial filters, Gmail checks if your recipients are frequently deleting the emails before opening and marketing them as spam.
Email History
Warm-up email before sending out emails is considered profitable as Gmail temporarily blocks the address for 2-24 hours and then delivers a few emails to the projected destination to check if they are marked as spam or not. If they are marked spam by the users, future emails may also be flagged.
12 Tips Of How To Stop Emails Going To Spam In Gmail
Even the most expert marketers experience issues in email deliverability. Therefore here are 12 tips that can help prevent your emails going to spam in Gmail.
Warm-Up Connections First
One of the major factors resulting in lower response rates and spam reporting is out-of-context emails. When prospects receive emails from unknown sources, they are more likely to ignore them and flag them as spam. This is the case with most promotional and advertising emails.
However, this can be avoided if you connect with your prospect using some other mode of communication – say, social media platforms like X or LinkedIn. LinkedIn prospecting is a great way to warm up your connections as it provides better connecting and networking than emails.
Once you get through to your prospect using social media continue with the engagement over email and now your chances of getting a response are high.
Keep Subject Lines Short And Relevant
What is the first that you notice in an email? It is undoubtedly the subject line, the same goes for your prospects as well.
The subject line of your emails decides whether you would make or break your chances of engagement with the prospect. A well-crafted and framed subject line is the key to compelling your audience to act and open up the mail.
One of the ways to come up with an engaging subject line is to look for your prospect’s interest and activities and align the same with your product and services.
This will help you get through to your prospect with ease and pitch your idea without getting flagged as spam.
Ditch Spammy Keywords
As understood above, spam filters placed by Gmail scan the content of the email for spammy and harmful keywords. Therefore, when marketers and advertisers use phrases that are barred by Gmail, it flags the email as spam irrespective of the content quality and intent.
Keywords such as Free, offers, sale, Discounts, Best Prices, and Get paid are some of the many phrases that trigger Gmail’s spam filter.
Focus On Content That Gets Replies
Gmail’s spam filter also monitors your email’s open and response rates and the intent of your content. Once you get a response, your outreach signals to Gmail that your content is harmless and relevant.
To enable such signals try framing your content more action-oriented rather than including flashy and spammy words. Be creative with your email content, ask questions that have a high chances of getting a response, offer value and help position your product’s worth through your content.
Suggest Users Create A Filter
In case you observe a low response rate for your emails, it’s more likely that they are already in the spam folder of your prospect. To avoid such situations, you can always ask your prospects to create a custom filter for your emails and mark them as “never send it to spam”. This filter would ensure that your future emails get filtered and are not flagged as spam.
To achieve this, you need to reach out to the prospect via different platforms since your emails are probably lying in their spam folder. You can use alternative platforms like Linkedin, X, or Facebook. You can find people on Facebook by Email – click to know more.
Steer Clear Of Spam Reports
In continuation of our subject line, as we discussed – getting spam reports on your emails is one of the ways to ruin your sender repute. A bad sender repute is one of the key reasons for spammed emails and this is not only limited to Gmail but also to other email service provider platforms.
Receivers mark emails as spam based on irrelevant and misleading content. Sometimes, out-of-context emails coupled with frequent follow-ups can also lead to spam reports. This fortifies the importance of outbound connections established outside emails.
Choose The Right Email Client
From a technical point of view, your email-sending IP address also plays a key role in determining the filtering out of your emails.
Your IP address also depends on the email clients that you prefer. To say, if you use an e-mail marketing service to reach out to your prospect in bulk, there are high chance of these emails getting flagged as spam as the IP addresses used by the e-mail marketers are shared among many senders.
Instead, you can use GrowMeOrganic’s Cold Email Software, which will help you to send Hyper-personalized Cold Emails with an automated follow-up feature.
Play By The Rules
Promotional and commercial emails are governed by the CAN-SPAM Act to avoid the spread of misleading content.
As per the act, receivers have the right to stop receiving emails from your address if they find you inappropriate or irrelevant. If you fail to abide by the act, a penalty can be levied on you.
The law prohibits including any misleading subject or sending emails to prospects who have shown disinterest in your emails.
Simplify—Less HTML, Fewer URLs
Regarding the above, your email’s HTML content is likely to be changed based on the email client you prefer using. If your email is filled with HTML, it may signal multimedia-heavy email content, which is considered promotional and may lead to the spam folder of the receiver.
It is noteworthy, that formal emails are text-heavy and don’t have much HTML embedded in the texts. The idle text-to-HTML ratio in an email is 60:40, which implies that an email should have 60% text as body content.
Avoid Blacklists Like The Plague
As we discussed earlier, how Gmail’s spam filter checks for blacklisted addresses. Once you get blacklisted all your emails will be directed to the spam folder and this is not just the case of Gmail but other email platforms as well.
However, there are tools using which you can check if your email address is part of the blacklist. Now, if you find your email as blacklisted, what’s next? You can always reach out to the administrators of these lists and remove your address after stating valid reasons. Consider that this process is manual and time-consuming, but it’s worth the wait.
Set Up Domain Authentication
In case you are using your domain to send out promotional emails, make sure to add authentication records.
As can be seen from the above, new rules from Gmail mandate the authentication records for bulk senders.
The domain authentication records are used for identifying and authenticating emails being sent out from your domain by service providers. This helps the recipient know that the emails are sent by the domain owners. Any email without an authentication record is considered to be spammy and malicious.
Always Test Before Sending
Before sending out emails to the final prospects, it is of utmost importance that you test your emails.
You can test an email by either sending it to yourself or your colleagues to check the format and check whether your emails are landing in the primary inbox or not.
How To Avoid Emails Going To Spam In Different Mailbox Providers
Here are ways using which you can stop emails from going into the spam folder in different mailboxes.
Microsoft Outlook, Hotmail, and Microsoft 365
Unlike Gmail, Microsoft doesn’t have ways to prevent emails from landing in the spam folder. All one can do is follow the general recommendations as described below.
It’s possible to whitelist addresses in the following two ways
- Marking the sender as safe
- Create an inbox rule
To mark the sender as safe follow the steps:
- Open Outlook webmail and click “view all settings”
- Click on the Junk Mail section and find the “Safe Senders and Domains” tab.
- Press “+ Add ” type the sender’s address and press enter.
To create an inbox rule, follow:
- Press the “+Add new rule ” and define the conditions
- If you want to receive emails from an address, select the address and set “From address” as a condition.
- In the action box add “To and click “Save ”
Yahoo! Mail and AOL
Similarly in Yahoo and AOL:
Click on more settings >> Filters >> Click add new filters >> Name your filter >> set “From” and “contains” >> enter the domain you want to whitelist >> choose “inbox” as folder >> Click save
Final Words
As an email marketer, it is essential that you know these strategies to prevent your emails from landing in the spam folder of your prospect. These strategies can help you identify the needs and understand your prospects before shooting out promotional emails. It will add value to your product or service propositions and prevent your IP address from being blacklisted by email service providers.
These will surely help you in the long run in achieving a higher response rate and give a boost to your future email campaigns. It will also ensure efficient deliverability and conversions.
Start your sales email campaign today with Growmeorganic and get Hyper personalised emails and automated follow-ups services at the tips of your fingers.
FAQs
Q 1. How Can I Prevent My Emails From Going To Spam In Gmail?
To prevent your emails from going to spam in Gmail – authenticate your domain, warm up your address, avoid the use of spammy words and content, maintain a clear email list, and encourage engagement among the prospects.
Q 2. What Are The Most Common Reasons For Email Landing In Spam?
The most common reasons can be a lack of authentication records, use of spam keywords and misleading content, blacklisting of email domains, high spam reports, inconsistent email sending patterns, and lower engagement rates.
Q 3. Why Are My Legitimate Emails Going To Spam?
There can be numerous reasons for legitimate emails going into spam – usage of spam-triggering words, Misleading subject lines, content not abiding by the law, poor domain repute, and recipient marking emails as spam without opening them.
Q 4. How Can I Improve My Email Deliverability?
To improve your deliverability you can follow a few guidelines while framing and planning your email campaign. You must keep the subject line short and attractive, ditch spammy content, warm up emails, and always test emails before sending them out to prospects. Additionally, always maintain an authentication record.
How Often Should I Clean My Email List?
To avoid lower response rates and increase the deliverability of your emails, you should clean your email list at an interval of every 3 to 6 months.
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