5 reasons why your emails land in spam folder

Messages placed in the spam folder can annoy many senders and cause serious problems while taking care of effectiveness of email performance. Do you know how can you handle this issue?

We often don’t even realize why mailbox providers filter out our emails as spam while we just want to deliver important information to our subscribers, e.g. registration confirmation or invoices. If your message passing the inbox folder over and over again you need to think about solutions which improve your deliverability as this may reduce the brand’s credibility, efficiency of actions thus the customer’s trust and their opinion about the company. We often read about disappointed and confused people who were waiting for an email to later find it in the spam tab or not find it at all. The same thing happens with newsletter sending, do you know how much of a profit potential you lose due to problems with email deliverability?

Are you having enough of this? Or maybe you are concerned that the situation may also become your problem? Check our advice to find out how to improve your email performance and deliverability rate.

Sending from a shared IP

Email messages are sent from properly configured server –  SMTP server. Each of them has a unique number – IP address.

IP addresses are divided into 2 types: dedicated and shared. Shared addresses, as the name indicates, are used by multiple users at the same time. It is enough for just one of them to send out spam, and all the rest will struggle whith successful emal delivery.

Caution – You are never 100% sure who you share your IP address with.

There are many more threats which concern shared IPs. We can add to it message queuing. One high-volume sending is enough to lead to message delays due to overloaded server or complete suspension. Most Polish (and not only) mailbox providers are blocking IPs if they notice too many messages coming from one IP per hour. Here we can find another threat – incorrect message segregation.

The lack of database hygiene

Taking care of hygiene of emailing databases should be a standard procedure for every marketer deciding on any email reactions with the customer. It’s very good to have a large list of contacts that you can brag about, because who doesn’t like high statistics, right? However, it is better to have a slightly smaller but effective base.

Invalid email addresses only increase number of your contacts and bring losses rather than profits. Having them in your database drives up your hardbounce rate and may often transform into so-called “spamtraps”, or traps for spammers. If there are many in your list, you may be considered a spammer.

The lack or badly authenticated emails

Email Authentication is a protection against spoofing of your domain and brand-damaging phishing attacks. In addition, email authentication affects deliverability. If you do not secure your email performance, you may be considered a spammer.

At present there are 3 ways of email authentication standards – SPF, DKIM and DMARC. The protocols differ from each other by the method of authentication, level of advancement and configuration difficulty. Implementing all three of them is a must for every brand that uses email marketing.

Email open rate

Since 2017, email providers control not only the percentage of invalid email addresses in your database, but also the number of inactive users. The more of your recipients have not logged in to their mailboxes for a minimum of a month, the lower will be your email deliverability.

Unfortunately, you don’t have an ability to check which of your recipients regularly log in to their mailbox. The only way to eliminate such cases from your email performance is to check who hasn’t opened your messages for a long time. If someone hasn’t opened any email for three months, you can assume that their account is abandoned or disabled.

Low IP reputation

IP reputation means how mailbox providers rate your emails. The higher IP reputation, the more chance your message have to reach the recipient.

The lack of a high reputation may indicate, e.g:

• presence on blacklists/RBLs
• frequent marking messages as spam
• high bounce rate (non-existent addresses in you contact list)
• high rate of unengaged users (have not opened emails for over 3 months)
• open and click rates
• lack of email authentication

Email branding matters

Make sure your recipients easily recognize your messages in their mailboxes by sending from email address that have legitimate and trustworthy domain. In this way you can easily grab subscribers’ attention and boost your deliverability as well as reinforce your business reputation. Avoid sending from a freemail addresses such as Gmail or Yahoo which may result in flagging your messages as spam or even rejecting most of them. These types of email addresses are often used by scammers and never look professional.

What else can you do?

If you still experience problems with email delivery or you have been blocked by email providers, please contact us and we will find a solution together.