Reasons Your Email Goes To Receivers’ Spam

Spam emails are emails that get into the junk box of receivers’ email addresses. Mostly they are usually advertising emails sent in bulk. Unluckily enough, email senders with good intentions get their messages delivered into the spam folder for some reasons that are discussed below.

• Imperfection of filtering process from email service providers

Email filtering is the process in which email service providers use softwares to organise emails sent according to some criteria. There may be errors from these softwares at times or from the owners of the email addresses. .

• Subscribe engagement

Your engagement level with the receiver and the receiver’s behaviour matters. If you send a particular message to the wrong audience, the engagement level will definitely be low. To prevent this, ensure you are sending to the right audience at the right time and also perfect your subject lines.

• Permission

Sending a message to someone that did not give you consent to do so is a turn-off. Get permission from the receiver first. You could do this by using opt-in forms on your website. Never buy an email list. If at all you want to do so, buy one that resonates with your main purpose and ensure you ask for their permission right from the first email you send to them by asking them to opt-in to your main email list. Give them reasons convincing enough why they should opt-in.

• IP Address

If your IP address is being used or has been used for spam emails in the past, this will highly likely affect you even if you never send spam emails yourself. This happens especially if you are using shared hosting. In case of shared hosting, you are not the only one using the IP address; therefore if another customer using the same IP address with you sends spam emails, it could affect your email deliverability as well.

• Your subscribers do not remember you (Spam complaints)

In this case, your sender emails are reported as spam by your subscribers regardless of whether or not the email was spam. Your subscribers forgot they gave you

• Low mailbox usage

Email service providers look at the ratio of active to inactive email accounts on your email list. An inactive account is one that has not been used for a long time or is rarely used by the subscriber. To prevent this from affecting you, clean up and validate your email list periodically so as to remove inactive accounts.

• Misleading email message subject line

CAN-SPAM Act (United States law that dictates a range of requirements for emails and other messages from commercial entities) states that it is against law to intentionally mislead someone with your subject line to induce them to view the message. In this case, it is when you as a sender use a subject line that does not resonate with the message you send.

• Inaccurate “From” information

It is against the CAN-SPAM Act to mislead anyone with your “from”, “to”, “reply-to” and routing information. Make sure you include a name in the “from” field that your subscribers are likely to remember and do not change it too often. It can be the name of an individual, your company name or a combination of the two.

• You do not include your physical address

You legally must include your physical address. Usually it is placed above your unsubscribe button (inclusion of this button too is important). In case you work from home, you can get a P.O box for business purposes.

• Spam trigger words

Check online to see a list of spam trigger words to avoid in your subject line or body copy. You can also use a website (for example, www.isnotspam.com) that runs through your message and picks out the spam trigger word.

• Whitelisting

This is a process that needs to be done by your subscribers. You can put them through should they not know how to go about it. Whitelisting of your sender email by your subscribers allows access of your email messages to the particular folder they choose (especially inbox). You can ask them to archive your messages to a special folder so they can easily see your messages from thousands of messages they get per day.

Following this advice will show improvement in your email deliverability. Do it step by step and take note of the differences.