Being flagged for spam is one of the biggest fears a marketer has when conducting an email marketing campaign. Having your mails flagged as spam can spell disaster to the conversion potential of your email marketing campaign. Furthermore, mails getting flagged as spam can also damage your sender reputation. In today’s article, we discuss exactly why your emails get flagged for spam and how you can prevent your mails from getting flagged as spam the next time to have an email marketing campaign. Keep reading.
Why do my mails end up in the spam folder?
There are a number of reasons your mails may be flagged as spam and end up in the spam folders of your customers’ inboxes.
- Emailing somebody without their consent: – Sending someone an unsolicited email can be a reason you get flagged as spam. Companies often send mails to addresses they source from ready-made email lists they buy, and very often these mail addresses do not consent to receiving any promotional mails. As a customer, receiving such mails can be very frustrating, not to mention how it is a violation of privacy.
To avoid such situations, we suggest you stay away from the temptation of sourcing ready-made email lists. While they may initially appeal to you as an easy source of contacts, sending mails to such mail addresses unannounced can be a cause for being flagged for spam. We thus recommend you build your email lists by yourself from scratch. You can do this by gathering contact information with the customer’s consent through newsletters and survey forms. The benefit of building your own lists is the guarantee of having legitimate email addresses that are comfortable with you sending mails in your list.
- An IP address that may be involved in spam activities: – While you may not directly have engaged in activities that may be perceived as spam, it may be possible that if your IP address has a dubious reputation, your emails too may be perceived as spam, thus inevitably sending them to the spam folder. It is thus important to verify your ESP before using it for your campaign. ESPs with a good reputation will keep your mails out of the spam folder while also having a positive effect on your sender reputation and boosting open rates.
- Poor open rates: – Emails with poor open rates may often find their way into the spam folders. This is because spam filters often take open rates into consideration while determining spam activity. To avoid low open rates causing your mails going into the spam folder, you can take measures such as using relevant subject lines, list segmentation, and frequent list cleaning.
Email verification services like X-EmailVerify provide email verification services that clean your lists and filter out spam email addresses. The result is an email list that only contains legitimate, verified email addresses.
- Spam complaints
A lot of times, unhappy readers may report your mails as spam. There may be a number of reasons for the same, ranging from poor quality of content to bad email frequency among others. It is thus crucial to ensure your content is of high quality and is up-to-date while also ensuring you send mails with the right frequency.
- No ‘unsubscribe’ button
Not including an ‘unsubscribe’ option in your mails can be a reason of great annoyance to your customers. Left with no other option, they may then choose to report your mails as spam. This can have a catastrophic effect on your campaign. To avoid such things from happening, it is very important to give your readers the option to unsubscribe from your mails at their discretion.
While mails getting sent to the spam folder may be bad for your email marketing campaign, it is important to learn why your mails may make their way into spam folders. We hope the points mentioned above will help you take better precautions to ensure your emails don’t make their way into the spam folder again. X-EmailVerify offers accurate, high-quality services that help in email marketing campaigns achieving a high ROI with the help of email list verification, SPF, DMARC, DKIM, and Syntax error checkers among other such features. Happy emailing!
