Why your emails are landing in SPAM?
Why does emails go into spam? You must be wondering while thinking about this question. It is quite irritating when you sent some message in email and recipient never checked it because your email landed into spam. And it is more irritating for email marketers who expect high conversion rates every time they send their offer.
Now let’s move to the reason about why your email lands in spam. Emails often land into spam when email service providers detects some issue with the email body and subject lines. These issues might include flagged keywords like ‘Gambling‘, ‘Lottery‘, ‘Drugs‘ etc. or a poor reputation of sender’s domain. When email service provider detects such issues in incoming emails, the server blocks and delete these emails right away or land them in spam folder. And a spam folder is a folder which we normally never check and recipient never reads your content or buy your products.
Hey wait, Don’t worry, we will go through the factors which flag your email or newsletter as spam in this article. And to make it sure your email is not detected by ESP or prevent them going into spam.
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But first let’s understand how the spam filters works
Spam filters are algorithm programs developed by email service providers to detect if the incoming email is legitimate or not. These algorithms are developed keeping a goal in mind to protect users from unwanted or harmful emails. Email’s spam filter works based on the number of factors to decide if the email is a spam or not. The factors are mentioned below:
- Gmail will check whether the sender’s email address is marked as spam and blacklisted before or not. It assesses the sender’s reputation based on previous email interactions.
- If the email is coming from unknown sender for the first time, the spam filter will check if the emails contains suspicious words or phrases like “Free“, “Win“, “Gambling“, “Viagra”, “Pharmacy”, “lottery” and “Make money online”.
- More grammatical mistakes in email body will also be filtered as a spam.
- Content Analysis: The spam filter scans the content of incoming emails, looking for patterns, keywords, and red flags commonly associated with spam.
- User Feedback: Gmail allows users to mark emails as spam or not spam. This feedback contributes to the filter’s learning process, enhancing its accuracy over time.
- Spam Reports: Google aggregates spam reports from users to identify trends and emerging threats, enabling proactive filtering.
Reasons why your emails are going into SPAM and best practice to fix it
Let’s quickly understand why your emails are going into spam and what are all factors triggering it as a SPAM and methods to fix this issue.
Using flagged words in Subject line or body
The most likely reason when ESP flag any email as spam, when it detects unusual words in subject line or email body. These words are marked / flagged as spam which mislead users and prevents them from phishy attacks.
Congratulations, Free, Guarantee, Viagra, Win, Pharmacy, Lottery, Gambling, Make money online etc. are the words which are usually flagged as spam by ESP’s.
Inaccurate ‘From’ Information
There is strict rule in CAN-SPAM Act to mislead recipient with fake or look alike sender. For example if you designed an email which pretend to be from Prime Minister with misleading or look alike sender name, that is illegal.
Send newsletter to your users from your legitimate name which your subscribers will are more likely to remember and don’t mark it as spam. It could be your individual name, company name or combination of both.
Misleading Subject Lines
In CAN-SPAM rules, it is illegal when you mislead the recipient with your subject line to encourage them to open your email. In a survey which was conducted, a 50% of users claimed that they got misleaded in life at least once. Below are some examples of misleading subject lines:
Urgent – Update your Information: If something is urgent, make the context as really URGENT. Don’t pretend to be urgent when email is really not urgent.
Thanks for your Order– Please fill your shipping details: Using transaction subject line, when email is not really a transactional.
Get a chance to Win exciting prizes this New Year – This subject line is used by phishing attackers mostly.
Your physical address is not mentioned in Email
This is standard practice that you mention your physical address in your email newsletters while sending newsletters to your audience. This builds trust in your audience and your audience finds your email as legitimate. Ideally the organization address is mentioned in email footer below to the Unsubscribe button.
Use UNSUBSCRIBE links
Not mentioning UNSUBSCRIBE button or link below to your email newsletters doesn’t only violates the CAN-SPAM policy, but also force your audience to mark your email as SPAM. Forcing users to receive your newsletters and not including UNSUBSCRIBE links in newsletters will force users to manually mark your email as SPAM. Which will then increase the SPAM score of your domain & organization.
Overuse of Capital letters, Special Characters or Emoji’s
Another reason why ESPs mark your email as spam because you are using too much capitalization or special characters. Using capitalization and Emoji’s (only when required) in natural way will allow spam filters to recognize your email as legitimate.
Excess misspelled, incorrect grammar or punctuation
Over misspelled words, grammatical mistakes or over use of punctuation will alert spam filters to mark your email as SPAM. Compose your email with proper grammar and punctuation to land it in inbox!
Malware attachments
Including attachments in your emails can sometimes trigger spam filters, especially if the attachments are of types commonly used to spread malware (like .exe files).
Be cautious while sending attachments, instead of attachments consider providing links to download files from a trusted source or cloud storage.
Uneven sending volume trend
Uneven email sending trend will alert spam filters, especially when there is a sudden spike in sending behavior. Try maintaining consistent email sending frequency to avoid being highlighted as spammy sending behavior.
Conclusion
Whether your are a email marketer or individual email user, if you abide to the email provider’s rules and laws created by CAN-SPAM, you will never be in SPAM filter’s flags. If you keep on violating the rules and if your IP address or domain’s spam score increases, you will definitely be caught by SPAM filters and it all ends up with either blocking your emails to arrive recipients or landing it into SPAM folder.
Also read here the effective ways to understand about the Email Filters and How it works!