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Spam — to know it is to hate it. Ever since the first unsolicited advertisement was sent by telegraph in 1864, consumers have been contending with what we now call spam, and the mass adoption of email has only made it easier for scammers and legitimate businesses alike to stuff our spam folders with ads for things we don’t need or want.
84% of the hundreds of billions of emails sent every day are considered spam, with advertising making up 36% of those messages. But surely this doesn’t include your company’s email newsletters and promotional messages, right?
Unfortunately, it might. While spam filters are pretty sophisticated and can usually recognize the real bad guys, it’s estimated that more than 20% of marketing messages never make it to their subscribers’ inboxes.
The simplest reason why getting sent to spam is bad for your email marketing strategy is because it means people aren’t reading your content. With 55% of email users saying they don’t regularly read any of their emails, the chances that subscribers will look for your message in spam are extremely slim.
But the less simple explanation has to do with email deliverability — the likelihood that your emails will go straight to subscribers’ inboxes. It’s a vicious cycle: once you’ve been marked as spam, you’re more likely to be marked as spam in the future, which harms your long-term deliverability. If you’re sent to spam enough times, you could even be permanently blacklisted (but you’ll get warnings from your email service provider first).
The first indication that you might be getting spam-filtered is your engagement rates. If they’re lower than you expected, it may be because your subscribers aren’t seeing your emails.
There are a couple of ways to confirm this suspicion:
Of course, your messages will go to spam if a recipient marks one as spam. Hopefully, your emails are valuable enough to your subscribers that the worst they would do is unsubscribe, but it is a possibility. Generally, though, the two main reasons a message gets flagged as spam are send frequency and content quality.
Your email frequency should be consistent — it’s less about how often you send messages and more about maintaining a pattern that spam filters recognize. So if you usually send weekly newsletters, a week where you send three messages might flag your address to filters.
There are other reasons you might land in spam, including misleading subject lines or sender info, too many attachments or links, non-compliance with GDPR regulations, and low subscriber engagement. But the most important things to focus on, and the easiest to control, is the quality and uniqueness of your content and that every person on your email list has opted-in to receive your email marketing.
Striking the right balance of images, hyperlinks, and text will indicate to spam filters that your email is legit, and avoiding trigger words will let them know you belong in the inbox.
Here are some of the kinds of words that might trigger spam filters:
The spam folder is every email marketer’s nightmare, but it doesn’t have to be your future. If you follow the guidance in this blog post and take a little extra care with your content and strategy, your messages will be more likely to land in your subscribers’ inboxes, which means they’ll have a shot at converting.
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