Spamming involves using messaging systems to send unwanted messages (spam). There are many reasons why your sent emails might land in the spam folder, and this article explains how you can prevent that from happening.
Spam prevention
To make sure none of your emails end up in spam, you should use preventive tactics for email marketing.
Make sure your contact list only contains those who subscribed to your list. Don't rent, share, or scrape email lists.
Sender reputation and email delivery are the sole responsibility of the sender, not the Internet Service Provider (ISP) or Email Service Provider (ESP). By renting, sharing, scraping, and co-registering email lists, you're sending unwanted emails to recipients who have not agreed or consented to receive those messages. Sending emails to such contacts won't generate revenue and damage your deliverability. All ISPs (AOL, Hotmail, Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail, etc.) monitor spam reports, and the more you get, the lower your chances of landing in the primary folder. Wondering what an acceptable spam complaint rate is? 0.1% is the rate you shouldn't exceed. If your rates are higher, make sure to make your 'unsubscribe' button visible. Respect your recipients' wishes and remember that unsubscribes are always better than spam complaints.
Your recipients should agree to and look forward to receiving your messages. To collect such subscribers, you can use Omnisend Signup forms.
2. Freshen up your email list regularly
Email Services like Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail have all been known to use engagement tracking to help detect and filter spam. ISPs track how each user is interacting with your messages. If a user is not opening or clicking these messages, then it is likely that the messages will go to spam for that user. The more users react this way, the worse things get overall; hence, a smaller, more engaged email list is better than a vast, unengaged email list. Regularly monitor your email engagement across all users. To ensure the highest engaged list possible, remove inactive recipients (those who don't open your emails). You can read more about this here: Inactive Contacts.
Also, make sure to remove bounced emails and role email addresses. It's recommended to check the list and clean it regularly. The quality of your list is much more critical and valuable than the quantity of your list. Clean up your list and watch your engagement and sender reputation grow!
Note! Our system will automatically suspend your account if your newsletter campaign gets more than a 7% bounce rate. Bounced emails get automatically removed by our system. Still, to reactivate your account, it is necessary to delete contacts that did not voluntarily subscribe to your brand, are old, inactive, or don't have an opt-in record.
Please follow the detailed guide below to start list cleaning in Omnisend.
Step 1. Navigate to Reports→ Deliverability.
Scroll down to Email list hygiene → click Go to email list cleaning.
Step 2. Here, you can decide whether to clean your full list at once (click Clean my full list) or individual segments by selecting them from the dropdown menu.
💡You can select multiple segments and clean them all at once.
Step 3. Once you've selected the audience, confirm the price for cleaning by clicking the Clean My List button. This service costs $0.20 per 100 contacts and is calculated automatically based on your contact list.
⚠️Please note that once you click Clean my list, you cannot cancel the process.
You can pay with Google Pay, bank payment via Link, or enter credit card information to be charged for the service. You may also want to save this data for future payments.
Step 4. Once we identify the poor-quality contacts, you will get two options:
Automatically unsubscribe poor-quality contacts; If you select this option, we will automatically unsubscribe poor-quality contacts for you; you will still have the option to choose if you want to unsubscribe other groups of contacts (disposable, unknown, etc).
I want to unsubscribe poor-quality contacts myself; You will get the breakdown of contact analysis and will be able to manually unsubscribe any poor-quality contacts or other groups of contacts (disposable, unknown, etc.) Described in Step 5.
Step 5. If you select to manually unsubscribe contacts, you'll see a detailed breakdown of the cleaned contacts. We advise cleaning poor-quality contacts right away.
You will see all the contacts in a specific category by clicking Show Contacts below each category.
While working with email list cleaning results, you can tag, unsubscribe, and download contacts in bulk.
That's it! Select the groups of contacts you want to clean → Unsubscribe contacts. Your list is cleaned.
Tip! You can always access your list of cleaning results from the main List Cleaning tab. We save all cleaning history for your easy access.
That's it! Your list is cleaned.
Read more about list cleaning and its benefits here.
Good practices
Using your own domain for the sender's email
An example is "[email protected]." It would help if you were doing that. Email service providers (such as Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, and others) are very picky if you send newsletters using their domains - @yahoo.com, @ymail.com, @gmail.com, @aol.com, etc. They will put your newsletter in the SPAM folder or reject it in most cases. In conclusion, in Omnisend, it's not allowed to use [email protected]. Use [email protected] instead. Read more about DMARC policy.
Practice a good text-to-image ratio
Your campaign or automated email should not just contain images. Some spam filters check the text-to-image ratio, and it is essential to keep it a healthy one. Providing two to four sentences per image helps give context to the ISP and your recipients.
Be aware of Gmail clipping
If your email is too large, it could be clipped by Gmail. Preview your message in a test email (or two!) and adjust the copy as needed.
When your email is larger than 100KB, Gmail will “clip” the message. The recipient must click on a “View entire message” link to see the full message. This size restriction includes everything within the email itself, including text, images, links, tracking codes, and responsive elements. Recipients who want to unsubscribe might click the “Report Spam” link instead because they won’t see the unsubscribe link unless they click to view the rest of the email. If this happens often enough, it will lower your sender's reputation and make it harder to hit inboxes.
When creating separate versions for mobile and desktop emails, it's crucial to keep the overall email size under 100KB to prevent clipping by Gmail. This limitation applies irrespective of additional layouts for specific devices. Ensure your content is concise and well-optimized to deliver the best user experience.
Managing your domain reputation
Have you ever tried to send a lot of the same emails directly from your inbox, trying to promote your products (before you started using Omnisend)? Then your domain's reputation may be compromised. You can check it out 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 store domain) is blacklisted, your emails will 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 THE SUBJECT LINE AND BODY TEXT. Don't do that (especially in subject lines).
Sending a test to multiple recipients within the same company (your colleagues). The company's email firewall may 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. They may trigger spam filters and route your emails to junk folders if overused. Risky words include: "prize", "free", "bonus", etc.
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 follow all of the above-mentioned best practices and preventive tactics.
If that does not help, don't hesitate to get in touch with our support so we can check if there are any issues on our end. We might be able to offer to sign SPF and DKIM records, move you to a dedicated IP, move to another one, send your sender's domain, and more. The particular steps depend on the case and would be recommended by our Deliverability team. Just note that additional charges may apply.
In our blog post about bounces, you can find more information about deliverability, spam, and getting into subscribers' inboxes. If you have more questions, contact us at [email protected].