There is nothing worse than spam. What’s worse? Having YOUR emails marked as spam.

If you put a lot of effort into an email or newsletter, seeing even one person mark it as spam can be very painful. I don’t understand why anyone would do that, do you? You send awesome email messages. No way should anyone consider that spam! Right?

First off What is SPAM?

The term spam refers to any email sent to someone who did not sign up to receive it. It is also known as unsolicited bulk email or junk email.

Nearly half of all emails are spam. This presents a challenge to email service providers such as Yahoo! and Gmail. Every day, they must sort through billions of emails and decide which ones people will actually want to see.

Despite the algorithms’ accuracy, mistakes do happen occasionally. Sometimes, however, perfectly legitimate emails end up in the spam folder. Here is why your emails might be categorized that way.

1. Your subscribers didn’t sign up for your emails.

There are numerous ways in which this can happen.

If you’ve changed the topic or content of your emails so much that you aren’t sending what your subscribers originally requested.

Suppose you’re a vegan food blogger, and you have an email sign-up box on your website that says, Get weekly tips to be a better vegan cook. After a couple years of blogging, you decide you really love cheese. Cheese is all you ever want to write about.

People who signed up for vegan cooking tips will be unhappy if you start sending them emails about cheese. Because they didn’t sign up for cheesy emails, they may mark all your emails as spam. After all they subscribed to vegan cooking emails.

Adding people to your email list who didn’t explicitly request marketing emails is a bad idea.

Let’s say you’re a freelance web designer with a lot of past and present clients. A newsletter is launched via email. Your newsletter list is then expanded to include all past and current clients.

Recipients may mark your emails as spam, regardless of whether they like your work or not. It’s nothing personal, but they didn’t actually ask to receive your newsletter. Their response will most likely be negative if you just start sending them your newsletter.

The old way of doing things was to assume all your LinkedIn contacts would not mind being added to your email marketing list. Unfortunately, people DID mind. Spam folders were flooded with emails.

It’s possible that some of your subscribers don’t even remember ever signing up for your email list.

Perhaps you’ve never added anyone to a list they didn’t ask to be on. You may not have changed the subject of your emails in a long time. Maybe they don’t remember subscribing to your list.

There is a possibility of this happening as well. This is especially true if you haven’t mailed to your list in a long time. Sometimes people just forget.

To overcome this forgetting factor, include a little snippet of dynamic content in your emails that explains how people signed up.

2. Confirmed opt-in isn’t being used

Double opt-in or confirmed opt-in is basically a way to double-check that people want to be on your email list. You have to ask your new subscribers to click on a link to confirm their address, but it’s also a way to eliminate bots, people with bad emails, and other issues.

Confirmed opt-in emails are automatically sent to people who complete your sign-up form. The email message asks them to confirm joining your list by clicking a link or button.

The following is an example of a confirmed opt-in message. Subscribers are not actually subscribed until they get this email and click the confirm my subscription button:

Oh hey there! You are just one step away from receiving the latest marketing advice. Please click below to confirm your subscription and start getting tips right to your inbox.

Thanks a bunch! Stay tuned for your first newsletter soon. -George :o)

If you use confirmed opt-in, your emails are much more likely to reach the inbox. You can also keep spam robots off your email list by using confirmed opt-in. Automated programs that find sign-up forms on your website and submit fake information to join your mailing list are spam robots.

Maintaining a clean list is easy with confirmed opt-in. It prevents a lot of problems before they even occur. Changing from single opt-in to confirmed opt-in could help you get more of your emails into subscribers’ inboxes, instead of spam folders.

3. The sender information for your emails is incorrect or missing.

A sender’s information includes their name, email address, and reply email address.

The sender information you provide to your subscribers is very important if you want them to receive your emails. Subscribers care about your sender information. They want to know who sent me this email?

Email mailbox providers also care about it. They want to know who sent this email? What can we do to verify that this is a legitimate sender?

To ensure your email is recognized and accepted by all parties involved, follow these steps:

Ensure that your “from” address and name are consistent.

You should include both your email address and your from name in your emails to subscribers. Select an easily recognizable from name that everyone will recognize. You should then stick with it.

Make sure the from email address you use in your emails is consistent.

Your email address should ideally have a custom domain. So, george@georgebalek.com rather than george@gmail.com or george45339@gmail.com. Then stay with it.

Please note that you can always change your sender name or email address. Simply, avoid doing it as much as possible.

It is important to make sure you have a valid sender email address.

You’ve probably seen emails from companies that contain a little note telling you not to reply, or that you won’t be receiving replies. You shouldn’t do that. You should be able to receive replies to your emails. An invalid sender email address can’t be replied to. It can be very frustrating, and can lead people to mark your emails as spam simply because you are making it difficult for them to read them.

The solution is to invite communication. Invite subscribers to give you feedback and contact you on social media in addition to using a good from address. People prefer to talk to people, not businesses. Be sure to inform your subscribers if you ever need to change your from line.

Authenticate your sender information with email providers like Yahoo! and Gmail.

Email clients must be able to recognize your emails as legitimate. To do that, follow these steps:

• Identified by DomainKey (DKIM)
• The Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
• DKIM and SPF are required for DMARC
• Identification of the sender

If you’re using a custom email address like contact@yoursite.com or george@yoursite.com, this is especially important.

Emails should include a physical address.

To comply with the CAN-SPAM law, all commercial emails (including newsletters and marketing emails) must include a physical address.

You will usually be required to do this when setting up your account with any email service provider.

4. You’re mailing to a purchased list.

It is never a good idea to buy an email list. Growing your email subscriber list yourself might take time and effort, but it’s always worth it.

You will always have poor results with purchased email lists, no matter who you buy them from. These people didn’t ask for your emails, so when they get them, they’ll mark them as spam.

A purchased list might seem like a shortcut to success, but it’s actually just a detour. Your results will be terrible, and your email service provider could ban you from using their service if they discover you’re mailing to a purchased list. It might seem harsh, but reputable email marketing services must protect their sender reputation. They cannot risk that reputation by allowing their users to mail to purchased lists.

5. Using low-quality list building tactics won’t help you build high-quality lists.

Email marketing lists can be built in many ways. There are some that are more effective than others. There are some methods that appear effective as they get you lots of subscribers fast, but they end up not being so effective since the subscribers you get really don’t care about what you’re sending them.

When building a list through contests or giveaways, this can happen a lot. People will say yes, I’ll sign up for your email list, but they’re really signing up for the giveaway or to win the prize. Your emails may never be opened by them once they are on your list. In even worse cases, they may mark your emails as spam instead of unsubscribing.

The use of ads to build an email list can also lead to disengaged subscribers.

You can workaround this by tagging new subscribers from any major list-building effort. In the future, tags can help you determine whether your list building tactic generated quality subscribers or just people who clicked on a great ad or participated in a contest.

6. Subject lines you use are misleading.

It’s good to have a catchy subject line, but only use subject lines that accurately describe your email. A “Re:” at the beginning of the subject line is an example of this. Tricky and misleading.

7. The unsubscribe link is hidden.

To save time, subscribers may mark the message as spam if they can’t find the unsubscribe link.

CAN-SPAM requires that all commercial emails include an unsubscribe link. Nevertheless, there are some senders who conceal unsubscribe links or obscure them.

If you want your unsubscribe links to be easily accessible, follow these steps:

• The linked text should say “unsubscribe.”
• Don’t change the color or font size of the unsubscribe link to make it hard or impossible to read.
• Use a link that lets you unsubscribe in one click. Logging into an account or going through many steps to unsubscribe is frustrating. No one has time for that. When people find it hard to unsubscribe, they may just mark your emails as spam, which is the fastest way to stop them.

8. Lists aren’t being maintained as well as they could be.

If you haven’t removed inactive subscribers from your email list for a while, that could lead to more of your emails going to spam.

An inactive subscriber is one who hasn’t opened an email from you in a certain period of time. There are some email senders who feel that six months is too short of a timeframe, so you can use twelve months, but we recommend six months.

To get your unengaged subscribers’ attention, try sending a re-engagement series instead of deleting them all right away. Don’t try to reengage your unengaged subscribers forever. Eventually, you just have to let them go. You’re not making any money from them anyway.

9. Link shorteners or unreputable domains are used in your emails.

Quite sophisticated algorithms determine whether emails will go to the spam folder or to the inbox. These companies don’t like to share every aspect of how their algorithms work. There’s no point in giving spammers any clues.

One thing we do know about spam algorithms is that the links in your emails are important. There is more to it than most senders realize.

A link tracker should almost never be included in an email. Especially when sending from an email service provider. ESPs already track clicks for you, so there’s no need to layer more tracking from another domain that could harm your reputation.

You should also avoid using naked links, such as https://www.example.com. Instead, embed the link.

Since https://www.example.com/ will be rewritten into a tracking link, and the visible text and linked text won’t go to the same place, mailbox providers are likely to flag these messages as phishing emails.

Keep your emails out of the spam folder.

Thank you for reading this article about email spam. Hopefully, you’ll be able to keep your emails out of the SPAM folder and out of Gmail’s promotions tab as well.

This knowledge is now yours to apply to your list. Based on what we’ve discussed here, what are you most likely to implement? Let us know what you plan to do in a comments.

To Your Marketing Success!
George Balek 😀