Why Your Emails Land in Spam: Deliverability Tips

How does ending up in the spam folder impact your business?

The ramifications of poor deliverability can be severe and can impact anything from customer confidence to your revenue.

1. Reduced engagement and sales. If your emails go to spam, no one reads them. This makes it hard for people to see your emails, which means less opens, less clicks, and less conversions. So if you use email marketing to drive sales or nurture leads, this can have an immediate impact on your revenue.
2. Damage to your sender reputation. Your sender reputation is crucial for inbox placement. If you find that your emails are repeatedly being labeled as spam, email service providers (ESPs) will view your domain as untrustworthy. This can cause even more of your emails in the future to end up in spam, and it becomes a vicious cycle.
3. Impact on deliverability across other channels. A poor reputation in one channel can have a ripple effect. Dissatisfaction in one channel can have negative spillover effects. If major ESPs start flagging your emails, it may affect who you’re able to reach on other platforms. So if you’re running multi-channel campaigns, low email deliverability might hurt your engagement on other digital touch points.
4. Loss of customer trust and brand credibility. When customers expect to receive communication from your brand and it never arrives, they may start to lose trust in your business. Your customers may even opt their way out, or report your emails as spam. 
5. Increased operational costs. Investing in troubleshooting or manual audits and hiring experts to clean up your domain reputation? These can be expensive in terms of both time and money, pulling you away from other business-critical efforts.

Common reasons why emails land in spam

From technical to behavioral deliverability factors, there are a number of reasons why your emails might not be making it into the inbox of a recipient. A few have to do with how you’ve set up your emails, a couple are associated with their content, and others can be traced to how your audience interacts with your emails.

Technical issues that affect deliverability

Poor authentication (missing or incorrect DNS records)

DNS records like SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) are used to authenticate emails and verify that they are coming from legitimate senders. Lacking these records, having them improperly configured or not matching up with your domain is probably why ESPs believe your emails are dubious and may be marked as junk.

🔖 Related Reading: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC: Boosting Email Security and Deliverability

Poor domain reputation

Your domain reputation is determined by how trustworthy email service providers perceive your domain to be. Factors like sending history, engagement rates, and spam complains all influence your domain’s reputation. If your domain has been used for sending spam in the past or has a low sender score, your emails will have a harder time reaching the inbox.

Q: What are spam complaints?

A: When you receive a Spam complaint, it means that the recipient has reported the email as spam. When this happens, it tells the email service provider that this message is spam.

🔖 Related Reading: Spam Complaint Rate: What It Is and How to Reduce It

Blacklisted IPs

When your sending IP is blacklisted, it means that one or more spam-tracking organizations have flagged it as a source of unwanted email. Email service providers consult these blacklists to filter incoming messages. In fact, the Warmy Research Team released a report on how major ESPs use external blacklists in their own filtering process. You can access the full report here: Understanding ESP Blocks: Causes, Types, and Prevention

Essentially, if your IP appears on these lists, your emails are more likely to end up in the spam folder. Blacklisting can happen if your emails are marked as spam too many times or if you’re sending large volumes of email too quickly.

Content-related issues that trigger spam filters

Now let’s say your technical setup is flawless—great job! However, certain content issues can still trigger spam filters. ESPs analyze the content of your email to detect potential spam characteristics, such as overuse of promotional language or suspicious links.

Use of spam trigger words

Spam trigger words are words or phrases that ussually appear in spam mails. Phrases like “free,” “urgent,” “limited time” or “guaranteed” are often identified by spam filters. These are the type of words that can make it look as though your email is distributed as a mass marketing campaign or a phishing scam causing ESPs to mark your emails as spam.

🔖 Related Reading: Spam filters: everything you need to know

Excessive use of images and links

Spam filters are known to search for a high image to text ratio typically seen in spam emails. Plus, having too many links can also trigger red flags, since spammers often leverage short links to mask nefarious content.

Aside from the presence of too many links, if your emails have broken links, it’s almost another surefire way of being sent to spam. A broken link is one that leads to a page that no longer exists or a destination that isn’t working. These types of links can be a sign of poorly maintained campaigns, and ESPs may see them as an indication that the sender is not trustworthy or professional. Furthermore, a dead link can result in a page with malware, or phishing, etc, so this is often a good spam filter warning.

Lack of personalization or generic content

Non-personalised emails or emails that look too mechanical are more likely to end up in the spam. Personalization (such as using the recipient’s name or personalizing content to match their interests) indicates to ESPs that the message is not part of a one-size-fits-all mass campaign. Conversely, when you have messages that contain subject lines and body text copy that are generic; they tend to be seen as spam because there is general lack of human encoded behavior these ESPs are looking for.

Behavioral factors impacting deliverability

Your email sending behavior plays a key role in determining whether or not your emails will end up in spam. ESPs keep tabs on how your recipients interact with your messages, and they use that information to determine whether your emails are good or bad.

Low engagement (opens, clicks, replies)

What do you do when your emails reach the inbox, but the receiver just doesn’t pay attention? If your emails regularly get low engagement (poor open rates, low clicks, low responses, etc.), ESP algorithms might start perceiving that users don’t want your emails.

High bounce rates

Bounce rates measure the percentage of emails that that failed to get delivered in the inbox of a recipient. A high bounce rate can indicate that you are sending emails to outdated or incorrect email addresses, which raises suspicions for ESPs. High bounce rates not only affect deliverability but also damage your reputation as a sender.

Rapid volume spikes and unusual sending patterns

If you increase the number of emails you send in a short time frame, ESPs could treat your messages as spam. This is particularly so when the additional volume is not in line with your regular sending behavior. If you send too many emails too fast, you can overload a mail server and spammers often employ this tactic. 

Deliverability tips to fix your email spam issues

Now that we’ve explored the common reasons why emails land in the spam folder, it’s time to dive into actionable steps you can take to fix these issues. There are concrete strategies to help you improve your email deliverability and keep your messages out of the spam folder.

Tips to fix technical issues

• Ensure that your SPF record lists the IP addresses or servers that are authorized to send emails on behalf of your domain.
  
• Set up DKIM to add a digital signature to your emails, proving they were sent by you and not altered in transit. Learn more about this here: Everything You Need to Know About DKIM Selector: What Is It and How to Find It?
• Configure DMARC to instruct receiving servers on how to handle emails that fail SPF or DKIM checks, helping to protect against spoofing.
  
• Keep a clean email list by regularly removing inactive or invalid addresses.
• Proceed to unblocking your blacklisted IPs if needed.  If you find that your IP is blacklisted, reach out to the blacklist provider with a request to delist it. This often requires showing proof that you’ve resolved the issues causing the blacklisting. Follow the steps here: Email Domain & IP Blacklist Removal: 5 Steps to Delist

Tips to enhance email content 

• Concentrate on crafting professional subject lines and body content that doesn’t depend on cloying narrative.
  
• Stay away from all caps, or an overuse of punctuation (“FREE OFFER!!! ”) since these are often used as spam.
  
• Avoid spam trigger words: “Free,” “Limited time,” “Risk-free,” “Money back guaranteed.” Focus on writing professional subject lines and body content that doesn’t rely on overly-salesy language. 
• Balance text and images to improve your chances of reaching the inbox.
• There should be minimal links and make sure they are reputable ones. Custom emails that say what’s up, either calling the recipient by name or customizing the content for their interest, are less likely to be called out.
  
• Personalize emails to address the recipient by name or tailor the content to their interests are less likely to be flagged. Ensure your emails have relevant content for each recipient, which shows that you care about their needs. 

🔖 Related Reading: 14 Tips For Writing An Excellent Email Subject Line + Examples

Tips to continuously stay away from the spam folder 

• Monitor how recipients engage with your emails—whether they open them, click on the links, or take further action. That way, you can act accordingly.
• Avoid sending emails to hard-bounced addresses and make sure your list is up-to-date.
• Maintain consistent sending patterns. Rapid fluctuations in email sending volume or irregular sending times can trigger spam filters, as these are typical behaviors of spammers. 

How Warmy can help with proactive strategies for maintaining high deliverability

Maintaining high deliverability is an ongoing process that requires constant monitoring and optimization. While fixing immediate issues is essential, it’s just as important to implement proactive strategies that ensure your emails consistently reach your audience’s inbox.

That’s where Warmy comes in. Warmy is packed with cutting-edge tools and capabilities geared to maximize deliverability, enabling you to get ahead of deliverability issues and supercharge email strategy on the fly. Here’s a look at why Warmy can help you to keep a good sender reputation and better inbox placement long term.

AI-powered email warmup to set you up for deliverability success

Warming up your email domain is one of the best ways to improve your email deliverability. Warmy’s AI-powered email warm-up tool automates this process by gradually increasing the volume of emails you send, helping to establish your domain’s credibility with email service providers (ESPs).