Spamming is the use of messaging systems to send an unsolicited message (spam). There are many different reasons why your sent emails might end up in the spam folder and this article explains how you can prevent it from happening.
Spam prevention
To make sure none of your emails end up in spam, you should use the preventive tactics when it comes to email marketing. Here are a couple of ways to stay safe:
- Make sure your contact list only contains those, who actually subscribed to your list.
- Use double opt-in for your signup forms. This way you will only have highly engaged subscribers.
- Don't send unsolicited campaigns or automated emails.
Good practices
Using own domain for sender's email
An example - "contact@myshopsdomain.com". You should be doing that. Email service providers (such as Yahoo, Gmail, AOL and others) are very picky if you are sending newsletters using their domains - @yahoo.com, @ymail.com, @gmail.com, @aol.com, etc. In most cases, they will put your newsletter in SPAM folder or reject it. In conclusion - don't use myemail@yahoo.com. Use contact@myshopsdomain.com instead. Read more about DMARC policy.
Managing newsletter content
Your campaign or automated email should not just contain images. Some spam filters check text-to-images ratio and it is important to keep it a healthy one. At least 50/50 ratio should be your goal.
This means that the more text you have on your email compared to images, the better it will be treated by spam filters.
Managing your domain reputation
Have you ever tried to send a lot of same emails directly from your inbox trying to promote your products (before you started using Omnisend)? Then it is possible that your domain's reputation is compromised. You can check it here. Just enter your domain (i.e. myshopsdomain.com) and click "Blacklist check" to check if it is blacklisted.
If your sender's domain (or your store domain) is blacklisted, your emails will definitely land in spam. Getting it whitelisted should be the first step before starting your email marketing.
Avoiding spammy content
Some spam filters do not like the way content is being phrased. Take a look below at some common mistakes that should be avoided:
- Excessive use of exclamation points!!!!!!
- Using phrases like “Click here!” or “Once in a lifetime opportunity!”
- USING A LOT OF ALL CAPS IN SUBJECT LINE AND IN BODY TEXT. Don't do that (especially in subject lines).
- Sending a test to multiple recipients within the same company (your colleagues). It's possible that company’s email firewall will assume it’s a spam attack.
- Hash-busting: Inserting random characters in the subject line or content to fool spam filters, e.g. “F.ree. p.r!z.e”
- Be careful with words associated with the language of sales. You can still use them but don't use them too often. If overused, they may trigger spam filters and route your emails to junk folders. Risky words include: “prize”, “free”, “bonus”, etc.
Other good practices
- Don't purchase mailing lists. They usually contain a lot of spam traps and inactive emails address. These two factors will harm your domain's reputation. If your newsletter campaign will get more than 4.0% bounce rate or more than 0.1% complaint rate ("marked as spam"), your account on Omnisend will be suspended.
- Don't use old or stale mailing lists. If you are migrating to Omnisend from other email service provider, import to Omnisend only those subscribers who were active (opened or clicked your newsletters) in last 6-12 months. Subscriber engagement is a huge part of getting emails into the inbox, when an ISP (internet service provider) sees low engagement rates they will often begin to bulk the campaigns to the spam folder. Then they will block the domain and IP addresses used to deliver the campaigns.
Bounced emails get automatically removed by our system, but in order to reactivate your account, it is necessary to remove contacts that did not voluntarily subscribe to your brand, are old, inactive or don’t have an opt-in record.
You may check your list with Neverbounce - https://neverbounce.com/omnisend (you get 20% discount using Omnisend link). You will need to export your entire contact list, remove it from the app, check the exported list with Neverbounce and upload your clean list back to Omnisend.
Dealing with emails landing in spam
In case your emails start landing in spam, there are a couple of ways you can resolve this issue:
- Make sure you are following all of the above mentioned best practices and preventive tactics.
- If that does not help, please contact our support to have it checked out for you.
- You might be offered to sign SPF and DKIM records, be moved to a dedicated IP, moved to another one or have your sender's domain changed. The particular steps depend on a particular case and would be offered by our deliverability team.
You can find more information about deliverability, spam and getting into subscribers' inboxes in our blog post about bounces. If you have more questions - contact us at support@omnisend.com.
