Keeping Your Emails Out Of Your Subscribers’ Junk Folders

Updated January 11th, 2021

One of the advantages of living in this technological age is having the benefit of email control and management. If you’re engaged in or any kind of personal or business activity that involves bulk email sending, you need to understand how to control your emails for maximum deliverability. For the most part, that entails keeping your emails from going straight to the spam/junk folder on your recipients’ end. The first step in avoiding this is to understand why emails go to the spam folder.

Why Do My Emails Go to Spam?
There are many factors that play into whether your email is delivered to your subscribers’ inboxes, or whether it gets automatically sent to the spam or junk folder.

1. Your subscriber isn’t actually a subscriber. In this scenario, your recipient never agreed to receive your emails. The individual didn’t subscribe, or he or she may not have even provided you with his or her email address. Maybe you got the address from a bad mailing list you purchased, or curated it yourself. Either way, you aren’t getting your intended result from your email campaign. Purchased lists are never a good idea, they contain spam traps that will sabotage your delivery.
2. Your subscriber data is getting stale. You don't have to purchase a list to collect spam traps. It's common for people to lose interest or change their minds after signing up. Sometimes people abandon accounts when they are getting too much spam. Networks recycle abandoned email accounts into spam traps and measure the interest of active accounts to gauge whether to place your messages in the inbox or junk folders. List Cleanings can help remove old stale data that has already become a threat to deliverability. Segments and Tags help you tailor targeted messages to make sure you stay in the inbox.
3. Your subscriber hasn’t added you to his or her “safe senders” list. Most email platforms today (Outlook, Gmail, etc.) allow users to create a safe senders list. This is a list of all the email senders that have been pre-approved to send emails to that user. If a valid subscriber has rules in place to prevent spam or junk mail, but hasn’t added you/your company to his or her safe senders list, your email could be circumvented to that person’s spam/junk folder (even though he or she wanted to read your email).
4. You’re email content/offer is not compelling to your subscribers – Check your metrics. If you’re open rate is trending downward re-think your content. Better yet – test new content with A/B Testing tools to see what does resonate with your subscribers.
   
5. Your email contains bad links or a blacklisted domain. These days, ISPs provide lots of built-in protection for their customers — including blocking emails that potentially contain viruses and/or spam. If your email contains suspicious links or blacklisted domains, your email could go straight to the spam/junk folder without your subscriber ever being aware that you attempted to email him or her. Use a spam checker tool to find bad links.

Stop Emails Going to Junk
You can prevent emails going to spam by instigating opt-in practices, asking subscribers to add you to their safe senders list, and vetting embedded links and domains. You can further increase your deliverability rates by eliminating addresses with expired domains, implementing re-activation campaigns and partitioning/categorizing your email lists for better management. These are all active steps you can take to stop emails from going to junk. What’s more, they can all be provided by ReachMail, helping to grow your business as well as your email success rates.

Solutions for Improving Delivery

1. List Cleanings. A List Cleaning can remove dangerous threats to your delivery and conversion results. Sending to spam traps, bots, recycled bounces, and invalid addresses is a direct path to the spam folder. Most delivery threats do not bounce, and spam traps can and do open and click on messages.
2. Segmentation: Use List Segments to prioritize delivery to hot (engaged) recipients first. ISPs like Google and Outlook grade your delivery opens. Sending to engaged recipients first or more frequently leads to better inbox placement. Continuing to send to cold (disinterested) recipients shows you aren't paying attention. You can use the built-in Segments, or create your own. Segments are easy to apply and enhance inbox placement with a few clicks.
3. Use Tags for targeted delivery. Tags can be added to recipients as a way to track specific actions. Have a special item for sale that always sells out? Tag the people that keep asking about it, so you can alert them first when new supplies are available. Tags are used with Preference Centers, Zapier (API) integrations, List Cleanings, List Imports, and many other features.
4. Run a Re-Engagement Drip Campaign with Auto Messages. By using Auto Messages to build a drip campaign, you can automate the process of re-engaging subscribers. Recipients that have stopped showing interest can be treated to special offers designed to make them engage with the message. It doesn’t have to be a revenue driving campaign, either. Send a survey or open ended question asking to recipients to reply with feedback. Once a recipient has stopped responding, getting them to engage again now will help them see future revenue driving offers in their inbox.
5. Use The Engagement Scanner to set aside unresponsive recipients. The Engagement Scanner was built specifically to target unresponsive recipients so that senders can prioritize efforts where the impact is greatest. With the Engagement Scanner, you can adjust the date range filter for your own needs, and remove or re-engage only the recipients who have never opened or clicked on any recent emails. A good general rule is that if a recipient has not opened or clicked on any of the last 10-15 emails, re-engagement efforts should be implemented.

There are lots of other reasons why your emails might go straight to spam/junk. One of the most powerful steps you can take to avoid this is to enlist the help of a qualified bulk email service provider, ReachMail. ReachMail has integrated practices in place to help you reach high deliverability rates to prevent email from going to spam. Contact Us today to learn more.