8 Ways To Stop Emails Landing In Junk

By Nick Smith
25th July 2022

 

 

Email marketing is an essential element of being in business in 2022.

With up to $40 ROI for every dollar spent, you probably already know it’s the most cost-effective way to keep in touch with your customers and create new ones. The problem is today’s email marketing landscape has changed, and in many ways it’s more complicated than ever.

Perhaps the biggest email marketing challenge in 2022 is having your message land in your recipient’s inbox – as opposed to being delivered into their Junk or Spam folder. If that happens there’s a good chance it will be ignored, which in many cases will translate directly into lost sales opportunities.

 

How can I tell if my emails are being delivered into junk/spam?

Short of asking your customers if the emails you’re sending are being received, the bad news is the global email system is somewhat archaic so there’s no way you can be completely assured your emails are getting through.

Most email marketing platforms like Mailchimp will allow you see which recipients open your emails, but you’ll have no way of knowing if those people who don’t open aren’t because they choose not to, or because your email was delivered to their junk folder so they never saw it in the first place.

Nor is solving the problem as simple as sending the email to yourself (or a colleague) as a test to see if it gets through. Due to the complex nature of the mail system, your email may be delivered successfully to some customers but not others.

What you can do is follow the best emailing practices you’re about to learn, to ensure your emails have the maximum possible chance of being delivered successfully. You could also use an email testing tool like Mail Tester which analyses & grades your email with a score out of 10, indicating how likely it is to wind up in junk. You can then tweak your email & observe how the score changes to improve its’ odds of getting through.

 

What is email sending reputation, and why does it matter to me?

You’re probably wondering who or what gets to decide if your email ends up in someone’s junk folder, and how that decision is made.

A simplified answer is your email address (the one your marketing emails get sent from) has a hidden “reputation” associated with it. It doesn’t matter if it’s a business email like CEO@mycompany.com.au or a personal email like bob@gmail.com, every email address automatically gets allocated a sending reputation.

Who assigns these reputations? The computer servers around the world that host all the email addresses – servers like Telstra.com, Gmail.com, and so on. These servers track every email you send, how often you send them, and the content of your emails. Then they use that information to determine your sending reputation.

The most important thing to note is your sending reputation isn’t set in stone – it naturally fluctuates over time, so if your reputation is terrible you can very easily improve it. In fact over time it will naturally revert to a more neutral value of its’ own accord, without you having to do anything except refrain from making it worse.

The only exception is if your sending reputation is so terrible that you wind up on an email blacklist. These are effectively lists of email users who’ve abused the system so crudely that any emails sent from their server are graded much more severely – meaning they’re far more likely to wind up in recipients’ junk folders, or not delivered at all. You can check to make sure your email address isn’t blacklisted using the MXtoolbox Blacklist Checker. Simply type the name of the server hosting your email address, for instance if your email is bob@gmail.com you would enter: gmail.com

 

What can I do to keep my sending reputation as healthy as possible?

The shortest answer? Never send emails!

In an effort to combat the increased proliferation of scam emails since the start of the pandemic, email servers are grading emails more harshly across the board. You may have noticed this yourself, with more emails from people you know & trust randomly appearing in your junk folder.

However at the very least you’ll want to email customers on a regular basis, and probably use email as a cost-effective way to reach new prospects. So how do you keep a stream of emails going out without your sending reputation being negatively affected? By adhering to as many the following best practises as possible:

 

Keep your email list clean

The older your email list the more important this is, as it applies to BOTH client lists and lists of potential prospects.

The problem is like physical addresses, businesses & people change their email addresses over time – except they tend do it a lot more often than moving to a new office, and with many people changing jobs during the pandemic this trend has accelerated.

If you unwittingly send an email to an inbox that no longer exists it will “bounce”. The worst case scenario is sending to a list containing too many bounces can cause your email platform (like Mailchimp) to permanently shut down your account.

Even if that doesn’t happen, sending to email addresses that bounce will assuredly affect your sending reputation negatively. This is why you may want to use a List Cleaning Service that can automatically detect bounces in an email list – even your client list.

We recommend the Removebounce and Zerobounce List Cleaning Services. Removebounce is more economical, while Zerobounce detects email bounces more accurately.

 

Avoid using Spam Keywords

Another way email servers downgrade your sending reputation is if you send an email contains too many Spam Keywords.

Spam Keywords are phrases & words email servers identify as popularly used by people who send scam & spam emails. Using phrases like “Free offer”, “Increase sales”, “Limited supply”, and even “Click here” will adversely affect your sending reputation and make it far more likely your email is delivered into junk.

It is especially important not to include any Spam Keywords in your email’s Subject Line, as this will cause it to be graded as spam very easily. We suggest taking note of this complete List of Spam Keywords.

Speaking of Subject Lines, using ALL CAPS or exclamation marks!! in them will have the same effect as spam keywords – making it more likely your email will be graded as spam.

 

Always spell check your email

This one may seem obvious, but email servers will instantly downgrade any email that contains spelling errors, making them more likely to be delivered into junk.

If the program you use to create your email does not contain a spellchecker, simply copy/paste the text into Microsoft Word (which will automatically underline any spelling errors), correct them, and then copy the text back.

 

Send relevant email content

The relevance of your email to the list you’re sending to is quite important.

Emails servers downgrade your sending reputation if they see only a tiny fraction of your emails are being opened. Not only is this one reason to keep your lists up to date & clean (since bounced emails automatically count as “unopened”) but it’s another reason it’d be inadvisable to send emails advertising veterinary products to a list of plumbers, for example.

After saying that, don’t forget the contents of your email doesn’t affect how likely it is to be opened – since recipients can only read it after deciding to open. Of course if they don’t like what they read they may be less likely to open your emails in future!

The most crucial thing affecting your open rate is your Subject Line. In many ways it’s more important than the email contents itself, which they’ll never read if the Subject Line doesn’t tempt them enough to open in the first place.

 

NEVER use videos or forms in your emails, or include attachments

Not only does embedding videos or forms in your email make it more likely the email is graded as spam and delivered into junk, but many popular email programs your recipients use to read email (like Microsoft Outlook) do not support the use of video or forms in emails – so all they’ll see is a blank space instead.

Attaching files of any sort to your promotional emails is generally a terrible idea since many people are so suspicious of scams & computer viruses they’ll automatically assume any email containing an attachment is potentially dangerous and refuse to open it.

The proper place for videos, forms & downloads is always your website or landing page, and from a sales & marketing perspective it already makes sense to bring recipients there as quickly as possible. Once they arrive good things can happen – they can comfortably navigate more information than a single email can contain, they may notice a completely different product or service that interests them, and on an ecommerce store they can purchase directly.

 

Don’t use excessively large images, or too many images in your emails

This one is fairly simple – using excessively large images in your promotional emails, or too many images in total will make it much more likely your email is graded as spam and delivered into junk.

We recommend using no more than 2 or 3 images in your emails, and the total size of all images does not exceed 100 kilobytes in total. In addition, the HTML code of your email can also affect deliverability. Excessive use of things like HTML <Font> tags can make junk the more likely destination.

We advocate using a professional marketing email template designed for you by an email deliverability expert – a service we offer here.

 

Make sure your email has a working Unsubscribe link

If you’re sending promotional emails, including a working unsubscribe link is not only a legal requirement but also effectively improves your deliverability. This is because recipients have the option to right-click your email and select “Mark as Spam”, which can negatively affect your sending reputation.

It’s been proven having a working unsubscribe link makes them much less likely to do this, since for the same amount of effort they can remove themselves from your list automatically by clicking your unsubscribe link.

If you’re particularly concerned, you can even position your unsubscribe link at the very top of your email – making it as easy possible for them to unsubscribe, consequently lowering the odds of the email being marking as spam accordingly.

 

Use separate email platforms to reach clients & prospects

Why use two different email platforms to send promotional emails? Partly as a safety measure. For example, if you use Mailchimp for both and send a campaign to an out-of-date list of prospects, if your account gets banned you’ll suddenly lose the ability to send marketing emails to clients as well and will need to scramble to find a new platform!

Using one platform to send marketing emails to clients, and another to reach prospects makes even more sense when you consider email platforms themselves affect deliverability – so if you send a high volume of emails to prospects on one platform, it will have less impact on the deliverability of your client emails if you send those on a different platform.

That’s why we created our own dedicated email platform, which you’re welcome to use to send your email campaigns. You can learn more about it here.