It might be frustrating to you for your carefully-crafted emails to end up in recipients’ spam folders, rather than their inboxes. There are, however, steps you can take to reduce the frequency with which this happens. Here are the most common reasons why emails end up caught in spam filters and what you can do about them.
You have an incorrect/missing SPF and DKIM setup
Adding correct and valid SPF and DKIM records to your Sendloop account proves that your emails aren’t forgeries and are coming from a legitimate sender. Without these records set up appropriately, email providers might flag your messages as ones coming from spammers.
The domain you’re sending from has been blacklisted
Sometimes, email providers blacklist IP addresses (or, in drastic cases, blocks of IP addresses) they think are being used by spammers. If the domain you’re sending from has been blacklisted, none of your emails will be delivered to your recipients’ inboxes. You can easily check to see if your domain has been blacklisted.
Your recipient engagement levels are low
One of the metrics used by email providers to determine whether you are a legitimate sender or not is your recipient engagement level. This is a measure of how much users interact with your emails (opening the message, clicking on its links, responding to the sender, and so on), and providers assume that senders with low scores are spammers.
There are many ways of increasing your recipient engagement levels, but some key factors include:
- Sending from an email address that has a monitored inbox, rather than an address like
no-reply@example.com; - Including your contact information (including name, address, email address, and phone numbers);
- Providing valuable content your readers are interested in so that they will click through on your emails.
Your subject line is low quality
Crafting a good subject line is very important since it’s what leads your users to open up your messages. However, you also need to make sure that your strong subject line accurately reflects the content of your messages–misleading subjects will eventually leads to declining levels of clicks. This lead to an overall decline in user engagement, indicating to email providers that your messages aren’t of interest to their users and might be better off delivered to spam folders.
Your recipients don’t find your emails relevant or they find them low in quality
First, ensure that your emails’ content reflects the subject line (and vice versa). Users may see discrepancies as a bait-and-switch, leading them to view your emails negatively.
Secondly, if the content you include in your emails doesn’t interest your recipients or aren’t relevant to their interests, they will be less inclined to read your messages. Over time, they may not even open your emails. All of this adds up to a low recipient engagement level, which, as we covered above, leads to a greater chance your messages get caught up in spam filters. Be sure to provide valuable content to your users; don’t just email for the sake of emailing!
Your hard bounce rates are high
Hard bounces occur when your messages are permanently rejected due to issues with the email address(es) you’re using. Not only do email providers track hard bounces, but Sendloop also does as well, since using email lists resulting in a high number of hard bounces is a key sign that a sender is a spammer. There are ways to reduce your level of hard bounces, including using a list verification service, using double opt-in, and so on.