Are Your Emails Being Marked as Spam? Here’s What You Can Do About It
Would you want to be friends with someone who goes behind our back telling people you’re not trustworthy? Me either. So why would you want to have such subscribers in your email list?
You don’t, but it happens: every sender gets at least one Spam report in their life. The problem is, when you get several complaints, inbox providers start losing their trust in you. That causes them to deliver your emails in the Spam folder or completely block them. Don’t worry, there are a few things you can do to fix and prevent such issues, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today.
What happens when your emails are marked as Spam
Before we get into ways to avoid this situation, let’s understand what exactly happens when subscribers label your emails as Spam. Why does that cause poor email deliverability?
It all starts with your sender reputation – an essential aspect of your activity as an email marketer. One of the factors that determine it is your overall content engagement. The higher your open and click-through rates, the more your reputation improves. On the other side of the spectrum, the more Spam complaints you get, the more inbox providers will believe you’re an illegitimate sender.
As a result, they’re going to start protecting subscribers from your emails – by either delivering you to the Spam folder, or not delivering you at all.
What can you do to fix that, and prevent it from happening?
Email list validation is a must
You care about your email marketing, so you know how important your email list quality is. If you’re looking for ways to maintain it, look no more: what you need is an email list validation system.
Email lists are at a constant risk of degrading. The most recent stats show that an average of 22.5% of your database goes bad every year. Some of the email addresses you’ve gathered become invalid or dormant. Some turn into spam traps, while others will develop into abuse emails. These belong to users who make a habit out of marking messages as Spam.
Apart from that, you may be collecting abuse emails right now, without even knowing it. An email validation system, on the other hand, knows if an email user will label you as Spam before that user ends up on your mailing list.
There are two ways of using an email validator:
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You can either do a bulk email list validation, where you upload your entire list on a platform and the system cleans it up. It removes spam traps, invalid, catch-all, abuse and other types of risky emails.
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You can install an email validation API to check emails in real time. Each new email address trying to subscribe will go through the process, and the API will reject abuse emails at the point of subscription.
Double opt-in? Yes, please
Another crucial step in preventing your emails from being labeled as Spam is to add the double opt-in on your signup forms. This requires every new subscriber to go through a double-step process to confirm they want to be on your list. Once they type in their email address in the form, they receive an email with a confirmation link they need to click.
When someone goes that extra mile to be on your mailing list, chances are they’re not there to mark you as Spam. They willingly subscribe to your emails, which means they’re interested in your content.
The double opt-in is a common email marketing best practice, it’s easy to implement, and safeguards the quality of your list. Unfortunately, it doesn’t prevent temporary or bot-created emails to spoil your list. So, to make sure you’re not getting any bad signups, you still need an email validation API on your forms.
Spammy words in your subject lines? Verboten!
They say you should never judge a book by its cover, but in email marketing, inbox providers – and people, too – will judge you for a spammy subject line. Words like cash, buy, loans, money or chance trigger Spam filters and may get your email in the Spam folder. Also, your subscribers may not even look at your content before they label your email as Spam if anything looks suspicious.
Spam is a continuous challenge for Internet Service Providers (ISPs). In 2018, 45% of the world’s email was spam. In this landscape, it’s easy to understand why ISPs are creating increasingly sophisticated tools to fight it. The sad thing is that sometimes, legitimate email marketers can have their communication lost or blocked in transit. It’s essential to stay on top of the most recent developments in the industry and adjust your email marketing as necessary.