Ask a Deliverability Expert: 6 Things To Do to Stay Out of the Spam Folder

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What are things I need to do to make sure I stay out of the spam folder?

Mailbox providers build and maintain complex spam filters in order to protect their customers and your subscribers from spam. So let’s start with a simple question: What is spam?

Most people think of spam emails as the types of emails sent from botnets, infected computers, or spoofers trying to send you towards malicious web pages to steal your sensitive data. But the inboxes don’t limit their definition of spam to just those types of emails. An email is considered spam if the recipient believes it is either unsolicited or simply considers it unwanted junk. Even if your business is legitimate and sells legitimate products, if your email is unwanted or unsolicited, it is considered spam. 

It’s as simple as that.

What else do I need to know about spam filters?

Mailbox providers have the responsibility to not only allow their customers to store, send and receive emails but to protect them from unsolicited emails. Their main focus is servicing their customers, and improving on their spam filters is a crucial component of their business. The more tactics marketers and spammers use, the more intelligent spam filters become. True email spammers — those people sending malicious emails — have always tried to find ways around the filters. They’ll purchase email lists, rotate IPs/domains, or regularly change email marketing providers.

But spam filters are getting smarter every single year. A few years ago, a spammer might have been able to get away with “hacks” like these. Not anymore.

If we understand what the true definition of a spam email is, it will allow us to look at our campaigns with the right mindset and help us change our list acquisition or campaign strategies. We sometimes don’t realize the power we have when we send newsletters. When an individual shares their email with you, they expect you to respect their inbox, time, wants, and needs.

Emails are extremely important for businesses, as email allows them to communicate in bulk with customers all over the world in a rather simple and straightforward way. But it’s easy to forget that behind an email address, there’s an actual human being. The first spam filters started reducing spam by analyzing and blocking emails coming from specific IPs. Today, spam filters are looking at an enormous pool of data to make better decisions. So what do we need to keep in mind to ensure inboxes allow our emails directly into the inbox — or any of the other tabs an inbox may offer?

Six things to do to stay out of the spam folder

Just like you would find a sender and return address on a physical letter, emails have headers that include a lot of information, such as authentication status, the sender email, and the IP it was sent from. But in recent years, spam filters have evolved to look beyond some of the information in the header, including the sender’s IP address. The more tactics people use to go around these filters, the stronger and smarter they become.

Most of the following guidelines fit within one rule: If you want spam filters to love you as a sender, keep your audience in mind and cater to their needs. If you consistently send great content to your readers, you shouldn’t have too many issues with spam.

With that in mind, here are a few specific things I’d recommend to help stay out of the spam folder.

1.) Authentication

I have talked and written a lot about this, but it never hurts to get another reminder. Authentication is the absolute first action you perform after buying a domain if you want to send emails, either from your inbox or an email marketing service provider.

Authentication is all about confirming your identity with every email that you send out. All you need is access to the settings portion of all the tools you use to send emails, plus your DNS. You should implement a DKIM record for each of the tools, combine all the sender IPs in one SPF record and enforce a DMARC record set to “none” when getting started.

2.) Consent

This one is easy: Don’t purchase lists. Don’t borrow or rent lists. Don’t communicate with people who don’t want your emails — even if you are legally allowed to in the country you reside or do business in.

If you send messages to people who didn’t sign up to get messages from you, the inboxes and spam filters are going to figure it out quickly. Mailbox providers want to minimize the unwanted emails that show up in someone’s inbox.

It’s important to understand that consent isn’t only about how you acquire or store your recipient’s email address. It’s also about what you do with it. Let’s say you write a newsletter for foodies, and you have a form on your website that prompts visitors to leave their email in exchange for a .pdf with smoothie recipes. That’s a great tactic to convert new readers to subscribers, but it doesn’t give you permission to subscribe them to your mailing list and send them three emails a day. Forms are there to help you organically grow your lists, but you need to ensure your new subscribers know upfront what they are getting themselves into. When expectations are met, spam complaints stay away.

Through subscriber engagement, positive or negative, a spam filter can tell when you are following list hygiene best practices… or not!

3.) Organize your sender email addresses

When it comes to companies with various types of emails, using different sender email addresses based on traffic type can help you with your relationship with a mailbox provider. This can be done on a domain or subdomain level. For instance, promotional campaigns can be sent using one sender email, receipts and billing emails from another, newsletters from a third address, and confirmation and other crucial emails from your business from fourth.

This doesn’t only help with deliverability, but also helps spam filters tell certain emails apart. Some will have higher engagement than others, and this will work in your favor.

Another positive of this strategy: When something happens to one stream, it can help ensure the issues aren’t affecting your whole email program.

4.) Engagement is key; Positive recipient feedback is crucial

Engagement is more than open rates or click rates. If everyone on your list read an email or clicked on a link, but didn’t perform the action you wanted them to, would you consider your campaign successful?

Recipient feedback can be positive, such as you would see with a true open, or negative, such as a spam complaint. With email, just like with social media, ratios are important. If a high percentage of recipients are engaging positively with your emails, the inboxes won’t penalize you the same way when spam complaints happen.

Imagine a sender whose lists are growing, but as they grow, the percentage of positive engagement starts to drop. Negative behavior will accumulate — they’ll start to see more bounces, spam reports, and other red flags. As time progresses, the ratios will keep growing in the wrong places and deliverability issues will start to show. If that sender doesn’t do anything about it, they’ll quickly end up in the spam folder.

Make sure you’re segmenting out inactive users, and regularly cleaning your lists, to make sure you’re only sending to readers who are truly engaging with your emails. That’s the most common solution to deliverability issues — there’s a reason why email geeks like myself talk about it so much.

5.) Rapid growth can sometimes hurt

Anytime you see rapid list growth, beware. (I’m not talking about growing your list by a few percentage points every month. I’m talking about doubling the size of your list overnight.) Any type of unusual change in sending volume can hurt your deliverability, even if it’s only for a short period of time. Spam filters are on the lookout for senders who might be buying email lists, and if they see an unexpected spike in emails sent from a single brand or person, they might get suspicious. Mailboxes expect senders to be consistent with their sending habits. Slow, steady growth is better for deliverability than a quick spike.

Volume is more than just the amount of emails you send. It’s also about frequency, consistency, and ensuring the changes are done slowly. You want to be able to give the spam filter the time to understand the changes happening with your email strategy.

6.) Focus on relationships

Within the world of marketing, long-lasting relationships are key. So remember, spam filters are here to help us humans. They’ll try to help us by looking for things that make us happy, and protect us by shutting out the things that can hurt and annoy us. So the relationship you are trying to cultivate isn’t only with individuals, but with the machines that are protecting those users. And just like with human relationships, abrupt changes and surprises can impact them.

Be smart — read up on various laws that might affect email in your country — and be human when sending emails. Remember the readers on the other side of that email, and always try to deliver great content for them. If you do that, you’ll do just fine in the long run.

A few final don’ts

• Don’t make the unsubscribe process difficult. If a reader can’t easily unsubscribe, you’re actually making it easier for them to report you as spam.
• Don’t create opt-in forms that are checked by default. Not only is automatic opt-in illegal in many countries, but it will create a lot of spam reports. Let users easily choose if and what they want to hear from you.
• Don’t try to trick readers with a subject line. Adding something like a FWD: or RE: in the subject line might get them to open — but also might leave them feeling deceived. An angry or upset reader is a reader who’s likely to mark your email as spam.
• Don’t change ESPs thinking it will help with deliverability.
• Deliverability isn’t about them — it’s about you, the types of emails you send, and the audiences you’ve built.
• Don’t use email marketing tactics you don’t like receiving yourself. If you don’t like those emails in your inbox, your audience doesn’t either.

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