Any serious email marketer knows how important deliverability is in their line of work and how critical is to be sent to the spam folder. After all, having high deliverability ensures that the messages they send have the best chance to be delivered to the inboxes of their recipients.
This is particularly crucial nowadays where internet service providers (ISPs) are using smart algorithms to analyze emails and make sure their users only receive messages they want. Unwanted emails are, thus, sent by these algorithms directly to the spam folder.
If you want to make sure that the emails you send always land in their designated inboxes, then you should learn how to avoid the spam folder altogether.
Tips on How To Avoid Spam Folders
Although there are no sneaky ways to trick these ISP algorithms, there are tips you can follow to give you a better chance of avoiding the spam folder and hitting your target inboxes.
1. Don’t Buy Email Lists
One of the worst things that you can do for your email deliverability is to send messages to contacts that you bought or rented off of a provider. With a purchased email list, you’ll be sending to users who didn’t actively and intentionally opted to join your specific mailing list.
The biggest reason why you shouldn’t get a purchased list is that you aren’t sure about the integrity of the email addresses supplied to you. It’s fairly common to be given a mailing list that consists of extremely low-quality addresses with many contacts dormant or no longer active.
When you send emails to random people, you’ll most likely find yourself in their spam folder, since there’s no relationship nor any track of permission given by that user.
The worst scenario is buying a mailing list only to find out later on that it’s filled with recycled spam traps that will lead your email account to get blacklisted.
Furthermore, the CAN-SPAM and GDPR laws make it illegal to transfer or sell email addresses to other lists. It also entails that when you send email marketing messages to people who haven’t opted for your campaign, you’re basically violating their privacy and you can have legal action filed against you.
2. Get Your IP Certified
One way you can solidify your reputation and prove to providers that you are no spammer is to get accredited by a dedicated third-party agency. There are many companies that can provide you with these services yet some of the most reliable are ReturnPath and SSL.com.
These service providers take into account your email practices and certify you as a trusted sender depending on whether or not you pass their assessment.
It’s possible to request S/MIME certificates for single and multiple email addresses. Once you have a certificate of quality, you can immediately attach this to your email software, so all emails you send will come with a digital signature and encryption.
When you verify your email address via a reputable agency, you are signaling to ISPs that you’re an email sender who follows the rules. This will improve your chances that ISPs will let your emails bypass their spam filters, thus increasing your ability to land in your target inboxes.
There are at least two reasons why you can get your name cleared when you leverage these services. The primary reason is that having accreditation is a time-consuming and laborious process, which means that senders who are only reputable and dedicated will pass these assessments.
Furthermore, nearly all reputable third-party accreditation agencies come with a fee when you use their services. Although the price varies, you can expect to spend as little as $20 per email address to as much as several hundred dollars.
Despite appearing to require a lot of money for email marketing, the investment is worth it in the long run. This is because you help guarantee that your subsequent efforts with your email campaigns won’t be wasted by having your messages sent directly to spam folders.
3. Don’t Trick Your Audience
Another significant tip that will help your emails from going to spam folders is by making sure you aren’t tricking your audience just to avoid spam filters. This is because you’ll eventually get caught with your actions and the consequences of trickery can be severe.
The following are the most common tricks you should never do when working on your email marketing campaign:
- Using misleading claims: Saying one thing in your email’s subject line and then failing to match the content inside the message.
- Hashbusting: Putting in random characters in your email’s subject line or content as a way to fool a spam filter.
- Deceptive subject lines: Using ‘FWD’ or ‘Re:’ in your subject line to trick people into believing that your email is a chain of messages and that you’ve been communicating with them for some time.
- Fake email sender: Changing your email sender name and pretending to be someone who you’re not.
If you do any of the strategies mentioned above, you can be sure that you’ll get red-flagged and your emails be sent to the spam folder.
4. Make Sure You’re Whitelisted
There are times when subscribers who are expecting your emails still don’t see them in their inboxes because, for some reason, you still landed in their spam folders. Even if you’re a legitimate email sender, ISPs and their algorithms can still fail and mark messages as spam even if they aren’t.
To resolve the problem of overactive filters and algorithms, you can ask your contacts to whitelist your email address. When whitelisting, a subscriber basically lets ISPs and spam filters know that your email address has been approved to send them messages.
If you want to know the best way to get people to whitelist your address, then you should give them clear directions on how to do so. Providing a quick and easy step-by-step tutorial is a great way to get things started as it increases the probability of them whitelisting you.
The catch here is that these steps will be different depending on the email service provider used by each recipient. For instance, Yahoo and Gmail follow a different approach for whitelisting. That’s why you should consider sharing article links instead to teach users how to accomplish this task.
6. Be Careful With the Content
It’s possible that your email campaigns are using risky elements that could hinder the deliverability of your emails. To make sure everything is in order, go through this brief checklist before hitting send:
- Using a single exclamation mark is sufficient for each sentence. Avoid shouting at your subscribers by implementing more than that. Additionally, exclamation marks have a high risk of being considered spam when you use them in your email subject lines.
- Be careful when you use words that are associated with sales language. Overusing these spam trigger words can easily alert filters and you can find your emails heading straight to the junk folder. Some examples of risky words include buy, bonus, free, prize, and purchase.
- Avoid going overboard with capitalizing your words or sentences. When you need to emphasize something, capitalize all letters from a single word per sentence at maximum. As much as possible, don’t capitalize all words in a whole sentence.
7. Set Email Expectations and Follow Through
One of the best tips on how to avoid the spam folder is by considering your subscribers as a friend or family member close to you who doesn’t like surprises. When subscribers receive any surprise emails from you, they may consider marking your messages as spam. This can have a significant impact on your chances of getting into their inbox the next time you send emails.
So before you start sending messages to your subscribers, set their expectations on what type of content they can get from you by:
- Letting them know what topics you’ll be covering
- How often you’ll be sending messages
- What your subscribers can get if they read them
It’s possible to share all of these details on your sign-up form or email landing page. Once this is set, follow through by providing your recipients the content you promised them.
8. Prioritize Sending Valuable Emails to Recipients
Your emails have a better chance of being delivered to your subscribers if they engage with them. To ensure recipients interact with your content, you want to send them content that they are actually interested in opening. This is also an excellent way of developing a solid relationship with your subscribers.
Having your clients engaging with your emails is a clear proof of your domain being trustworthy. If ESPs see this interaction they surely won’t send your emails to the customer’s spam folder.
Messages that your recipients will enjoy opening are those that are valuable to them. Some examples of content you can provide that hold value include those that are:
- Informative
- Entertaining
- Educational
As an email marketer, you should consider the different ways you can help subscribers by helping solve specific problems and improving their lives. Identifying their pain points is a great way of crafting legitimate email content that provides value to your recipients.
9. Perform Tests and Review Emails Before Sending
Emails that provide a bad impression of your company can have a higher likelihood of being marked as spam by subscribers.
Two of the easiest way to make bad impressions are by:
- Using typos and punctuation errors
- Having rendering problems
You can avoid making these mistakes by regularly reviewing your email content before you click send. You should also get another person to proofread the copy of your email while you’re at it.
As for rendering issues, you can ensure that your content shows up correctly by reviewing how your messages appear when sent to different email service providers like Gmail and Outlook.
10. Leverage the Power of Double Opt-In
Double opt-in, also known as confirmed opt-in, is perhaps the best way you can increase your probability of avoiding the spam folder.
With double opt-in, you help make sure that your subscribers are interested in joining your mailing list by sending them a message as soon as they subscribe. This lets them confirm their subscription and also their interest in taking part, which ensures that their ESP won’t send your emails to their spam folder.
This type of email you’ll send to them is called a confirmation email and can be automatically generated through your chosen email marketing platform. Your subscribers only have to click a button in this email to confirm.
Using double opt-in improves the probability that the emails you send using your chosen email marketing platforms will deliver your messages. These platforms will see that your emails contain content that your subscribers actually want to open.
Keep in mind that where you get your subscribers usually has a significant effect on how successful your email marketing campaigns are going to be. For you to maximize success, you should focus efforts on sources where you can acquire subscribers that bring in the most value to your brand.
To avoid the spam folder, you should stop using those sources that result in the highest complaint and bounce rates and lowest engagement.
11. Practice Regular Email Hygiene
Good email hygiene means removing contacts who are no longer active on your mailing list. Although this may seem like painful news, you need to remove subscribers who are no longer engaged if you want to maintain your deliverability.
Disengaged subscribers are those people who haven’t clicked or opened one of your emails recently. These contacts have a negative effect on your ability to reach inboxes if you continue to send to them because they lower click-through and open rates, which ISPs don’t like.
The good news is that many email marketing platforms charge members depending on the size of their list. When you delete disengaged subscribers, you only reduce your bill for your email marketing campaigns while improving open and click-through rates.
12. Provide an Easy Way for Subscribers To Unsubscribe
Many countries legally require email marketing campaigns to have an unsubscribe link included in their emails.
The problem here is that most marketers aren’t happy about this rule. They usually incorporate their unsubscribe links at the very bottom of their messages and are oftentimes difficult to locate.
Rather than make it hard for users to find this link, make yours easily seen by boldly displaying it in your email content. You can include an unsubscribe link at the top of your email newsletter and inform subscribers that they can unsubscribe if they don’t feel these messages are helpful.
Keep in mind that every email marketing campaign is a relationship with a set of contacts. Having a good relationship here is when both parties get value out of each other. Subscribers who are no longer getting any value should unsubscribe instead.
Otherwise, you’ll notice that these subscribers will not click or open your emails, which harms your overall deliverability. The worst thing they can do is to mark your message as spam, especially if they can’t locate the unsubscribe link.
13. Avoid Being Involved With Spam Traps
Spam traps are those email addresses that ISPs and anti-spam services set up to purposely catch spammers. These traps are in the form of standard email addresses but are not associated with specific individuals.
Since they aren’t currently being used by people, there is no way that they can be subscribed to a mailing list in the first place. That’s why sending messages to an address designated as a spam trap is basically considered as sending spam in itself.
You can minimize your chances of encountering spam traps by not buying email lists from brokers and harvesting these addresses on the web. Using a confirmed opt-in or double opt-in process is highly recommended.
Furthermore, you should regularly keep your email list clean by removing inactive addresses and ensuring that all email addresses are spelled correctly.
14. Minimize the Use of Certain Types of Attachments
File extensions ending in .jpg, .png, .gif, .pdf, and .zip are generally considered to be safe attachments that you can use given that they should also come with their own content. What you should avoid sending are those executable files like the ones ending in .swf or .exe. Sending large attachments could also trigger your email to be marked as spam.
In case you really need to send big files or the type that is often considered as spam, it’s best to upload it to a website that comes with a download link and provide the URL in your email. Using services like DropBox offers features that let you upload and download files without worrying about security.
15. Keep Track of Email Engagement Metrics
Your email marketing campaign’s engagement metrics provide you with a true understanding of how your contacts interact with your messages. Most email service providers supply some of these metrics to their members, but the more in-depth statistics are available through third-party tools.
Some of the engagement metrics you should keep an eye on include:
- Open rate
- Click-through rate
- Read rate
- Unsubscribe rate
- Share and forward rates
By going through these metrics, you get to see exactly what’s going on with your messages when they arrive in recipients’ inboxes. It’s possible to keep track of the process each step of the way while providing you with enough time to improve your campaigns as you go.
Best Practices to Avoid the Spam Folder
The following are some of the best practices you should consider incorporating in your email campaigns if you want to prevent your emails from being sent to the spam folder. These practices can be used together with the tips above to reinforce your email marketing efforts.
Don’t Use Dynamic IP Addresses for Your Email Campaigns
A dynamic IP address, also known as a shared IP, is the type of address that can be used by multiple individuals or user accounts. A few examples of sharing IP addresses are those operating within a single Wi-Fi connection or ISP.
Although there are benefits to shared IP addresses, it also comes with some serious risks. The main problem with these dynamic addresses is that your IP can get flagged if those users sharing with you do shady activities.
Your deliverability can be severely affected by the online behavior of others sharing the same IP address as you. If you get to share it with reliable senders who follow the best email practices, then that’s a good thing. If not, then you’ll suffer the consequences even if you didn’t participate in their antics.
As a reputable email marketer, you don’t want to put yourself at the mercy of others when it comes to your sender reputation. This is especially true since this will make or break your overall performance.
Instead, you should secure a dedicated IP address where only you and your business colleagues are the ones who can use it.
Choose Anchored Links Rather Than Direct Links
Two of the most common ways you can insert a link in your email content can be either through a:
- Direct links such as https://google.com
- Anchored links such as Google
Both of these linking types are great, but using anchored links is generally better and neater. Furthermore, using direct links appears to have adverse effects in terms of email deliverability. This is because spammers tend to incorporate links that do not lead users to where they think they will.
That’s why email service providers and anti-spam agencies focus on direct links in the body of the email as these have the most chances of being spam, and, of course will more probably be sent to the spam folder.
As for anchor links, you can include a link by just adding a hyperlink to the text, which shouldn’t harm your email deliverability.
Consider Creating Both Plain Text and HTML Versions of Your Email
With plain text email, you get to provide content that is simple yet clear to your recipients, while HTML lets you add some creativity to your campaigns. So why not combine the best of both worlds?
Apart from spending time to create several variations of the same message, having a plain text and HTML variant lets ISPs know that you value your recipients by making your email campaign easier for them to consume.
When this happens, you can expect your sender reputation to improve while lowering the risk of being flagged as spam.
However, you want to ensure that the HTML coding skills applied to your emails are in top shape. If your emails have incomplete or broken tags, you’ll end up having the opposite effect with this approach.
Add Alt Texts to Images in Your Email
A significant portion of email users are disabling images being displayed in their emails to let these messages load faster while taking up minimal space. Although this can be troublesome on your end, it shouldn’t be a hindrance for you.
Instead, you should work on making sure that your recipients can still comprehend the content of your email even if they have images disabled. Adding alt texts to the images you include can help describe the nature of your email.
This lets people know what your emails are all about even if they cannot see the actual images you included.
To Wrap Things Up
The tips and best practices provided in this article should give you a good start in your email marketing campaigns moving forward. You should incorporate both to have the highest probability of success with your email marketing efforts.
At the end of the day, you can learn how to avoid the spam folder by simply sending emails that are expected and wanted. Email senders who create and send emails that follow the tips shared in this post should have a good chance of reaching the inboxes of their recipients.
