How to fix emails going to SPAM - Part 2
Previously, we elaborated on a few technical reasons why your emails might be going into the SPAM folder. However, did you know that the content of your email also plays a vital part in determining whether emails are classified as ‘spam’?
Sometimes, even if everything is perfect from a technical standpoint, your emails can still go to your recipients’ spam folder due to the faults of your content, some of which you might not even be aware of.
Today we are going to be sharing a few tips that will help you understand how to structure and edit the content of your emails to make sure that they will go straight to the target’s inbox. So without further ado, let us begin!
Avoid letter capitalization
Never use capitalization in the content and the title of your emails. It would be fine to highlight or put an emphasis on a couple of points, but you should mostly try to avoid unnecessary capital letters in your email. This can detract the attention of your readers and email receiving software can flag it as spam.
Additionally, make sure you also use common fonts such as Arial, Verdana, Helvetica, Georgia, Tahoma, Lucida, Trebuchet or Times. This is because some email clients won’t render your fancy fonts, meaning that your message might appear differently for each user.
Email content advice - avoid excessive capitalization, styling & color
Be expressive if necessary, but do try to keep that expressiveness in moderate doses. The more exclamation points you use at the end of your sentence, the greater the chance of your email not making it to the recipient’s inbox.
Make sure your text is readable. Think of what you want your readers to make out of your email. Avoid using complicated words, terminology and oversaturated structural elements.
Too much highlighted, underlined, or bold text can also result in your email being flagged as spam. Draw your readers’ attention to the meaning of your content rather than the styling of the text. Make sure you put an accent on the things that really matter.
Do not replace traditional letters with other characters and avoid using too much color when it comes to your text. It would be best to stick to one primary color and color-code everything depending on its importance. Use it sparingly in order to really highlight important elements or sections of your email.
Other email content tips - size, unsubscribe option, subject line, contact relevance
Emails that are larger than 3 MB in size will most likely miss the inbox and go directly to the SPAM folder of your recipient. Because of this, you need to keep your email size as low as possible, ideally below 250KB.
In terms of frequency, you should avoid sending your emails too often. If you need to alert people of potential problems or issues, then you can make an exception for this rule. However, frequent email sending can be flagged as spammy. If you are sending out a newsletter, make sure to do so only once a week or month, depending on the volume of content that you need to share with your users. Focus on the quality and not on the quantity.
Make sure your email offers a possibility to unsubscribe especially if you are sending out a newsletter or any promotional materials that users have previously subscribed to. If you don’t provide people with such an option, they could flag your emails as spam, which would damage your overall credibility and reputation. This can really hurt your marketing strategy in the long run especially if you send important information over email.
Next, make sure that you keep your email database relevant and updated. By sending emails to non-existent email addresses, the risk of being considered as a spam-sender increases exponentially.
Following that, we take a step back, focusing on the subject line of your email. It should be something meaningful and straight to the point. Again, do not capitalize it in an attempt to make the email seem urgent. Also, avoid placing any call-to-action texts in the email’s subject line.
Even more email tips - media, grammar, spelling, avoiding spam words & implementing analytics
Ensure that each email you send has properly linked media. Never send an email that only contains links, images or videos. Attaching images is also not considered good practice if you are sending out promotional material. Instead, add the image as a link to its hosted address. Additionally, you should also never use JavaScript elements in your emails as algorithms can find that suspicious.
Our next tip is to carefully check your text for grammatical and spelling errors, text structure, readability and clarity issues. For example, Grammarly is a great tool that also has a free version which you can use to check that everything is okay prior to sending the email.
Avoid using spam words at all costs. These are high-profile words that are predominantly used in spammy, malicious and inappropriate emails. If large volumes of such words are detected by SPAM-catching algorithms, the filters will automatically redirect your email to the SPAM folder. Examples of such words are ‘100%’, ‘#1’, ‘claim now’ and others.
Our penultimate tip is to implement some form of analytics for your email. Grab yourself an email analytics tool and keep track of which emails are successful and which fail to get seen. An email with a low or non-existent open rate can be a sign that it has gone to the SPAM folder. You can then use this data to construct your emails more efficiently and to debug any issues that you think might have caused the problems. Additionally, such analysis tools can also help improve your email marketing campaigns.
Finally, make sure to check whether your email follows all of the required guidelines and regulations so that you can be confident that it won’t be flagged as spam. A useful tool which you can use to make these checks is Mail Tester.
We hope that this information has been helpful and that our tips can help you figure out exactly why your emails are ending up in the SPAM folder.