According to Statista, more than half of all emails are spam.
Most of the emails that get filtered to spam really are just spam. People would be annoyed if they had to manually filter through all of these emails, so Internet service providers (ISPs) and email services (like Gmail) set up filters to automatically block spam emails before they appear in the inbox.
For that reason, you must do everything you can to ensure your messages are delivered to the inbox of the intended recipient. Fortunately for you, we’ve compiled 5 reasons why your emails go to spam and what you can do about it!
Let’s dive in, shall we?
1. Your Email Servers Have Poor Reputation
Similar to the way you have a credit score that is based on the way you carry your personal finances, how often you pay things on time, and such, an email server has a “reputation score” for its IP address. Major email providers such a Google & Outlook use AI in their email filtering, and part of the intelligence fed into these machine learning algorithms is the ongoing reputation of a particular email server’s IP address. Companies assign an IP risk score to these servers which can be used to analyze user and content quality. These scores are elevated whenever malicious traffic or high spam is detected. This information is continuously monitored by major email providers and integrated into the intelligence feeds at Gmail and Outlook.
This means even non-newsletter-type emails could be sent to the recipient’s spam folder. There’s nothing more tedious than trying to conduct business with someone via email and each message you send is going to their spam folder or customers who chat in because they didn’t get a copy of their order confirmation, but later find it was in their Spam folder.
What can you do about this? Well, you can host your email with a company that cares about maintaining a high IP reputation score! For instance, here at GetHost, we’ve partnered with MailChannels to have your emails always delivered to the Inbox of your recipients.
MailChannels uses sophisticated algorithms and machine learning to spot spam-like trends in a stream of outgoing email coming from mail servers and stop it in its tracks.
Best of all, at GetHost, this feature is included for you at no extra cost with all our web hosting plans.
Yes, that’s right, all e-mail accounts you create under your hosting with us are backed by the MailChannels network.
2. You are not using DMARC, DKIM, and SPF in your DNS
Okay, if you’re not a techie, you probably think that’s word soup. No worries!
DMARC, or Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance is an email validation system that helps you stop email spoofing. It detects and automatically protects you from techniques used by bad actors in email phishing campaigns.
DKIM is short for DomainKeys Identified Mail and is an email authentication standard created to enable senders to connect their domain name with their email using cryptographic authentication as a way to prove emails sent from this domain are legitimately from that domain. For the average user, an email saying it’s from PayPal, Apple, or Amazon might not obviously appear as a forged email. That’s why it’s important to protect your own domain from these attacks. In short, DKIM is a type of hidden technology that keeps people from sending emails saying they are Amazon and click here to reset your password when really Amazon didn’t send that email.
SPF is short for Sender Privacy Framework and is another technology used to detect and block email spoofing. Similar to DMARC, SPF isn’t only an email validator but also a protocol and provides you with a strong defense mechanism. When there’s an incoming email, the IP address from which the email was sent will be verified against the list of authorized IP addresses in that Domain’s SPF records. Spammers and those sending out phishing campaigns are less likely to use a domain that has a published SPF record.
You can follow our KB article here to setup SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records for your domain.
3. Your recipient marked you as spam (maybe accidentally)
In many email clients, users have an option to manually mark emails as spam.
If the person who you’re trying to email previously marked your emails as spam, new emails that you send will also likely end up in the spam folder as well.
Additionally, if you’re sending out bulk emails, too many people marking your emails as spam can negatively affect your reputation as a sender. This can increase the chances of your emails ending up in spam even when you send to people who didn’t mark you as spam.
4. Your Message Subject Lines Contain Trigger Words
If the subject line of your newsletter or message contains trigger words, the message will automatically be sent to spam. Trigger words are a term for verbiage that is designed or styled to catch the attention of the recipient. You can break down most trigger words into the following categories:
- Manipulative words or phrases; these include words like, “Urgent!”, “Act Now!”, “Limited Time Offer”, “Call Now”.
- Outlandish claims and statements; these include verbiage like “Once in a lifetime”, “Money-making”, “All-natural”, “Money back guarantee”, “Earn extra income”.
- Inappropriate greetings; these include greetings like “Dear <your email address>”, Dear friend, Greetings of the day!, and Dear <wrong name>.
- Needy and spammy subject lines; this one includes great ones like “Please open me”, “Read please”, “Can we have a minute of your time?”, and my favorite one “Instant weight loss!”.
- Words that say your email isn’t spam; really you would think people would use this because it is so obvious the effect would be the opposite. Using phrases like “this isn’t junk”, “this isn’t spam”, “not spam”, and “mark this as not junk” certainly won’t get you to the top of many inboxes.
Make life easier on yourself and craft your emails without trigger words. While there’s no surefire way to avoid the spam filters, ensuring your email is on point and the wording you choose isn’t hyperbole. Be your authentic self! Check out this great list of 100 Common Spam Trigger Words from Vision6.
5. Limit Your Sending Frequency
As a business owner, you’re thinking about your business 24×7. It’s your livelihood, after all, I totally get it. But your customers and subscribers aren’t always thinking about you the same way you think about them. Yes, if you have a popular brand and have a really engaged fan base on social media that’s great, but you probably have a whole other percentage of customers who love your products just as much but don’t engage on social media at all.
Those people probably have more important things going on in their Inboxes and don’t need to hear from you every day, for example. When it comes to receiving newsletters, studies show most users prefer to receive them once a week, with the second most preferred being once a month. And oddly, other studies suggested Tuesday was the best day on which to send out new email campaigns as Tuesdays had a higher open rate than others throughout the year of 2020.
When a new customer signs up to receive your content, ask them how often they want to hear from you. You can further segment these results by people who want weekly messages or just a monthly newsletter. Giving your subscribers exactly what they’re asking for reduces your chances of getting marked as spam!
Summary
To conclude, there are at least 10 good reasons why your emails go to spam, from not staying relevant with your customers to having a poor IP reputation at your email server. No matter the reason, taking care when composing your email campaigns, doing some research on your target audience, and observing some simple courtesy rules will yield the most (and best!) results and maintain that trustworthy reputation your brand has worked so hard to achieve.
By using technologies like DKIM, DMARC, and SPF, you increase the security around your brand and strongly remove the possibility someone would be sending emails impersonating your brand and also ensure your messages are delivered properly.
If you enjoyed this article, you’ll love GetHost’s Hosting! Don’t forget all Gethost customers receive the benefit of MailChannels outbound email scanning to ensure your messages are delivered to the inbox of the intended recipients.
Check out our web hosting plans!
