How to prevent your emails from ending up in SPAM?

Your content strategy is just as important as ensuring your emails reach the widest possible audience, which is why we thought this article might be of interest.

In this article, you will learn:

• The best methods to increase your email deliverability
• How to protect your emails from SPAM filters

What is email deliverability?

Deliverability refers to the initial stages in the life of an email:

• Sending
• Receiving
• Opening the email

It is a crucial factor, perhaps the most important for the success of a campaign. What’s the point of running campaigns if they don’t reach your audience?

Let’s take a look at the key points for ensuring good email deliverability:

Who is this email from?

Correctly identifying the sender of the email prevents the recipient from marking it as SPAM. If we ensure that the "from" field in our email clearly identifies our brand, we make sure that at least our customers know it's from us. Another resource we can work with is using the email subject line to reinforce our brand's presence in the email deliverability stage.

Cleaning the database

When sending mass marketing emails, it’s normal to receive messages about inactive email accounts. It’s vital to remove these emails from your database before the next send. Most email marketing systems use filters that prevent such sends and clean the database, but beware—a bounce rate above 20% in one of your sends could end your digital marketing strategy due to your IP being blocked for future sends. Another good practice is to clean out email addresses that haven’t interacted with your sends for months.

Frequency of sends

We’re not here to talk about whether you should send 1 or 10 emails per day—it’s not relevant. If someone can generate 10 relevant emails that interest the customer, why not? What we are proposing is to be strict when it comes to delivering what we promised our subscribers, even if that means working with multiple audiences. For example, if someone subscribed to our weekly newsletter, we can’t start sending daily promotions to that subscriber. It’s crucial to deliver what we promised.

And the final point... avoiding SPAM filters

So far, we’ve talked about more technical factors—actions we can take to ensure our emails are delivered and opened by the people we want to reach. Now it’s time to deal with the machines... The filtering process is carried out by engines that use artificial intelligence, so this won’t be an easy task.

First, we’ll briefly explain how these systems work—it’s good to know your "enemy". There are several systems, but the most common ones use keyword lists. They analyze which emails users classify as SPAM and extract the most frequently occurring words in those emails. Now, check this out for yourself—log into your personal email and take a look at your SPAM folder. You’ll see certain words repeated. For example, you’ll likely find the word "save" at least three times in the subject lines of the first 50 emails received.

Other factors, like response rates, customer complaints about your sends, frequency, or volume of sends, can also be relevant variables in these filters.

Now that you know what you need to know...

• Use common sense—don’t jeopardize your strategy by being careless.
• Clearly identify yourself so the user can recognize who the email is from.
• Clean your database of "toxic" records. If you exceed a 20% bounce rate, you risk putting your domain at risk.
• Think about the subject line and body of your email from the perspective of "forbidden" words...

If you follow these simple rules, your emails will land in your subscribers' inboxes, bringing you one step closer to a successful campaign.