How to land in the spam folder (and how not to).
When I was in 5th grade, I wrote a love letter to a girl named Alba. She and I didn’t talk much, but I always saw her during recess and thought she looked awfully pretty.
I instructed a classmate of hers to pass the letter on. After school, I waited at the place I told her to meet me, but she never came.
Later, I found out that this classmate had a crush on her, too.
My love letter was never delivered.
Make sure your love letters always reach their recipients.
The same can happen with your emails. It’s not a dickhead classmate that’s intercepting your message, but the email providers’ spam detection.
If you don’t adhere to a few simple best practices, your emails brush past the inbox and go straight to the spam folder, where they rot forever.
In this article, I’ll tell you what to avoid and what to do to ensure high email deliverability (you don’t have to be a pro to get these right).
What is email deliverability?
Email providers (like Gmail) and clients (like Spark) have gotten real smart at segmenting incoming email. Besides the usual inbox and spam folder, they now also have promotions, social, and updates. In what folder your email ends up determines your success in email marketing.
Email deliverability is the likelihood of your emails reaching your recipient’s inbox. Not the spam folder, not the promotions folder, and not any other folder but the inbox.
Have you ever looked at Promotions, Updates, or Social? I never do. Maybe you didn’t even know they existed.
Here’s proof that they do, right from my own, unedited, inbox:
These folders are where the light never shines. Let me tell you three sure-fire ways to have your emails end up there.
The top 3 ways to go straight to the spam folder.
Disclaimer: This section is satire (to be taken with humor). I’ve written it as advice, but you should avoid it at all costs.
Buy an email list.
Who needs organic list building or mailing consent when you can just buy an unlimited amount of email addresses to burn through? While the fools are getting a few leads a day through their blog, you can just buy 20,000 email addresses for $2,000 and get going. Boom, suckas.
Make your headline look like annoying advertisements.
Go ALL CAPS with loads of obnoxious ✨🔥emojis🔥✨ and end the line with a bunch of exclamation marks!!!! That’s the best way to let your recipients know that you have something important to say.
Send as many emails to as many people as you can.
You spent good money on that list, so put it to use. Bleed it dry. The more you pitch, the more you sell. And when the list is exhausted, you can always go back to tip #1!
How to avoid the spam folder (and hit the inbox).
Now for the real advice. Avoiding the spam folder isn’t magic, and you don’t need to be a tech savant to do it.
You just need to follow the basic technical requirements for setting up your email sending structure and be human when you write and send your emails.
Use a dedicated sending subdomain.
Your reputation as a sender is based on the server (IP address) and domain you send your emails from. If you’re not super advanced in email marketing and sending regularly to lists of over 50,000 people, you don’t need to worry about your IP address. Your email software is taking care of it.
(If you are super advanced in email marketing, you’re probably wasting your time with this article.)
As your sending domain, you should create a subdomain. You can name it send.yourdomain.com or hi.yourdomain.com or whatever else you think is cool. It doesn’t matter what it’s called, just that you have it.
Email providers treat the reputation of subdomains separately from each other and the main domain. If you fuck something up and your reputation takes a hit, you can just create a new subdomain and start from scratch. If you use your main domain, your normal emails might end up in spam. Irreparable damage.
Authenticate your email account.
This part is the most tech-wizardly. You need to add three entries to your server (DNS records) to authenticate your email account.
- SPF: Sender Policy Framework allows the receiving mail server to verify that an email is coming from the correct sender and not someone impersonating you.
- DKIM: DomainKeys Identified Mail does the same thing but is in the header of the email itself, so it remains intact when the email is forwarded.
- DMARC: Domain-based message authentication, reporting, and conformance tells the receiving servers how to handle incoming mail based on DKIM and SPF alignment checks.
It doesn’t matter if you understand them. The way you set them up depends on your email software. A quick Google search like “how to set up spf dkim dmarc [your email software]” will do. Most guides will include the setup of all three entries.
Test your setup.
When you’ve set up your sending subdomain and added the authentication records, run a quick test to be sure you’ve done everything right.
Go to https://www.mail-tester.com and use your email software to send an email to the generated address. Make it plain text, no design yet. The tool will tell you if you’ve done well in setting everything up.
Save that website.
You’ll do another deliverability test when you have your first, fully-designed campaign ready (and maybe some more tests until you hit all the right marks).
Warm up your brand new account.
When you first start sending emails, the email providers (like Gmail or Outlook) don’t know who you are. You might be a friend, you might be a spammer. If you get a consistently bad open rate (below 20%) and spam complaints (above 0.1%), you’ll be classified as… yes, a spammer.
If you get great open rates and no complaints, the email providers will start trusting you and make sure to deliver whatever you send.
To warm up your domain, you should send high-engagement emails, like a welcome email when someone joins your newsletter or a thank-you email when someone makes a purchase. Those generally have a very high open rate and are great for building trust.
Soon, you’ll send your first campaign to a wider audience. This audience should consist of your most engaged readers. Gradually, you’ll send more campaigns to a larger audience until you see consistent open and click rates.
It can take up to three months for your email performance to settle while providers evaluate your reputation.
Send good emails.
You’re done with the setup; now comes the hard part. You have to send campaigns and build flows, not just with sales in mind, but also with deliverability. Those two goals are like a long-married couple that loves each other but doesn’t always hold hands.
A converting ad headline might be “100% FREE ebook with your next purchase! (LIMITED TIME ONLY).” An image on a website might illustrate something perfectly on its own. A good landing page has many buttons that lead to the desired next step.
If you use that ad copy in a subject line, you land in the promo folder. If you use only images, you might get sent to spam (email clients can’t read images), and too many links will get you there even faster.
Instead of the usual bullet-point list of little things to look out for, like HTML to text ratio, unsubscribe links, and image best practices, here’s…
My best tip for writing a deliverable email: Pretend you’re writing a letter to a friend you haven’t talked to in a while.
Only write when you have something to say.
As every aspiring non-spammer, you’re probably asking yourself how often you can send an email without becoming a spammer. The simple answer is: Write as often as you have something to say.
People subscribe to your emails because they want something from them. That something might be learning to write better copy, getting your best discounts, or just knowing what your business is up to.
As long as you can say something that helps them get closer to that goal, say it.
Never send out weekly newsletters with nothing but fluff because you think you need to adhere to some self-imposed (or worse, a marketing guru-imposed) sending frequency.
If you send too much, your open rates will drop. This is how you know you should dial back your sending frequency.
Clean your list regularly.
Over time, some people will unsubscribe. Others will just stop opening your emails. Don’t worry about it. Doesn’t mean your emails suck. It happens to all of us.
You should clean your list every six months. Find out who hasn’t opened any of your emails in the last 180 days, and ask them if they want to stay on your list and keep receiving your emails.
If they don’t confirm or even open your email, delete them from your list.
Congratulations, you learned to crawl.
What you learned here is the email marketing equivalent of learning to crawl.
When you nail a high delivery rate, you want to become really good at persuading people. After all, you aren’t sending emails for the hell of it. You want your readers to take action. That takes some serious copywriting skills.
Strategic thinking is involved, too. How do you ideally segment your target audience? What content do you send, and when do you send it? What is your overall goal? How can other channels tie in with email?
Don’t treat each email as a one-off thing. A sound strategy is a must.
If you ever need a hand with any of it, give me a shout.
– Pat