There are times where you will experience delivery issues and your email could end up in spam or junk. After doing some research, I have tried to find the best ways to ensure that your emails don’t trigger any spam / junk filters.

There are times where you will experience delivery issues and your email could end up in spam or junk. After doing some research, I have tried to find the best ways to ensure that your emails don’t trigger any spam / junk filters … I hope it works for you as it has done for me!

Contact List

The most effective way to avoid delivery issues is sending it to an appropriate audience. This means that you haven’t used a contact list from a third party or emailed an unengaged audience.

Building your own mailing list and doing a data clean (if you haven’t already done this prior to the GDPR ruling) will help you get accurate details. When building the list, where you are able to, provide a double-opt-in so that recipients have to verify their contact details which then demonstrates to your email provider that the contact is genuine. It is also a good exercise for brand awareness and familiarity as when the recipient is sent a verification email, this can be branded to the company. If done correctly, it could also potentially encourage more traffic to the website which can lead to other things such as sales!

Authenticate your account

There are inbox providers that enable you to authenticate and verify your email to ensure secure mail delivery. You can authenticate your email by;

  • Sender Policy Framework (SPF) verifies who you say you are by comparing the sender’s IP with a list of IPs authorised to send from that domain.
  • Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) ensures that the email was not tampered.
  • Domain-Based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) requires both the SPF and DKIM to pass in order to send and deliver email.

Your email / hosting provider should be able to help you ensure that the authentication process has been carried out successfully.

Avoid blacklists

Reduce the risk of ending up on a blacklist by;

  • Using opt-in or, ideally, double opt-in,
  • Removing dormant/unengaged subscribers, and
  • Using address validation (e.g. ensuring there aren’t any typos in emails).

A good way to monitor if you have been blacklisted is by looking at open and delivery rates. If you see drops in stats, this could signify aforementioned issues.

Clean your data

Having a contact list with a few engaged recipients is far better than having a large list with unengaged recipients as low engagement rates can viewed as spam. The best thing to do to avoid this is to monitor the users that are not opening your emails and send them an email asking them if they want to update their marketing preferences. If they do not reply, move them to another list labelled ‘dormant’. Doing this is better than deleting them as if you have a campaign that you think may encourage them to engage with you in the near future, you can then target that contact list.

Set mail preference options

Adding a preferences link to emails gives subscribers the opportunity to set their own preferences to which emails they receive and how often. With this feature, subscribers are less likely to unsubscribe and you will find that you have a higher open rate as not only has your recipient opted in (possibly twice if you have enabled the aforementioned feature) but have chosen to receive specific marketing and are therefore genuinely interested in the message.

Monitor key metrics

Tracking the following key metrics can help your email program notify you of any actions / changes that need to take place;

  • Spam complaints.
  • Open rates.
  • Click-through rates.

If your email program notices that there are dips in your analytics, it will warn you and tell you which metrics are showing negative trends. When you know this, you can then do some further research into why this may be. For example, if you are getting; 

  • Spam complaints – you will know that you will need to look into your contents.
  • Low open rates – you will need to improve your content and perhaps email design
  • Click-through rates – you will need to check that urls are accessible (perhaps you need to add buttons instead of linked text to make hyperlinks more obvious) and relevant.

Remember, the higher the email engagement, the more likely the email won’t end up in spam.