3 factors determine whether email marketing messages end up in the inbox or in spam

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There’s a lot more than just words and phrases that end up where your email marketing messages end up – in inboxes or spam and junk folders. Today, email service providers (ESPs) like Google, Outlook, Yahoo, Apple Mail, etc. have sophisticated algorithms that they use to determine which messages go to the inbox, which go to spam, and which get blocked entirely. It’s up to email marketers to keep up to date with the latest email marketing best practices to ensure the campaigns they send have the best chance of landing in inboxes.

While ESPs’ algorithms contain thousands and thousands of data points (and they’re updated after every email marketing campaign you send), each piece of the puzzle used to filter messages into inboxes or spam folders correlates to three main factors: 1.) your sending history and reputation, 2.) the content of your message and 3.) technical settings. Let’s dive into each of these three factors so you can take the right steps to get into inboxes in the future.

Sending history and reputation

What do email service providers think of you as the sender? If you send your email marketing messages from your own domain (e.g. yourcompany.com) then you have 100% control over your sender reputation (also called domain reputation).

It’s best for email marketers to send campaigns from your own domain rather than using a shared domain provided by your email marketing platform. When you share a sending domain, you also share your sending reputation with everyone else using that domain, and there are a lot of spammers out there. You don’t want your email deliverability to be negatively impacted by these bad actors!

LEARN MORE: Why domain reputation is critical to email marketing and getting into the inbox

So if you’re sending your email marketing campaigns from your own domain, it’s up to you to build a good reputation with ESPs so they don’t flag your messages as spam.

ESPs look at your sending history to see if you’re taking the time to segment your lists, personalize the content you send so it’s as relevant as possible to recipients, and Only send messages people want. You determine this based on how people react to the messages you send.

Put simply, ESPs think you’re sending content that people want to receive engage positively with your messages via:

• Open them
• Clicking on links in the messages
• File in a folder
• Hand off
• answers to them
• And so forth

On the other hand, ESPs think you’re not sending content that people want as recipients engage negatively with your messages via:

• Leave them in the inbox and never open them
• Delete your messages without opening them
• You wait a long time to open them
• Mark them as spam
• Block as a sender
• And so forth

As an email marketer, it’s up to you to put the time and effort into building and maintaining a good sending history and reputation.

Here are some of the things that are most important to showing ESPs that you’re a good sender so your messages get to recipients’ inboxes and not their spam or junk folders:

• Broadcast on a consistent schedule
• Don’t send to more than twice the number of recipients you sent your last campaign to
• Don’t send duplicate content that you’ve already sent in a previous campaign
• Segment your lists and personalize the content of your message so it’s as relevant as possible to the individual people on each list
• Clean up your lists and remove people who aren’t engaged

If you follow the best practices above, you’ll be well on your way to building a strong sender reputation and getting your messages into inboxes.

LEARN MORE: Why you need to clean up your email marketing list for the best results

contents

The second factor that email service providers use to decide whether your email marketing messages will get delivered to inboxes is the content of your messages. The first thing to consider when writing email marketing messages is relevance, as people are unlikely to engage positively with messages that aren’t very relevant to them.

How do you make sure you only send the most relevant messages? They segment your lists into laser-focused audiences and send hyper-relevant content personalized to each individual audience. One-size-fits-all no longer works in email marketing.

In fact, the spray-and-pray approach is a ticket to the spam folder today, as generic messages sent to bulk lists don’t get enough positive engagement – they’re not relevant to enough recipients. As a result, you will receive more negative engagement, which will hurt your reputation as a sender and the deliverability of all your email messages in the future.

Instead, create buyer personas and customize your message content for each persona to get the greatest engagement and results. Yes, it’s easier to message everyone and hope someone bites. However, sending that one message today can do a lot more harm than good as ESPs might mistake you for a spammer.

LEARN MORE: How to create B2B buyer personas to improve email marketing results

In addition to prioritizing segmentation and personalization to improve relevancy and increase engagement, you also need to be aware of the current spam triggers that ESP algorithms look for.

Remember, if your sender reputation is high, you can probably have some common spam triggers in your messages and still make it to inboxes. However, if your reputation as a sender is not high, just one spam trigger can mean the difference between you ending up in the inbox and ending up in spam.

Here are some common spam triggers to avoid:

• More images in your message than text
• Too many links in your message
• Difficult to see unsubscribe link
• No clear and obvious physical mailing address for the sender
• Excessive capitalization, punctuation, or special characters in the subject line
• Poorly formatted HTML
• URL Shortener
• Embedded forms, embedded videos, Flash or Javascript
• Excessive spelling or grammatical errors
• hidden text

Keep in mind that ESPs’ spam algorithms contain thousands of criteria, so the list above is far from exhaustive. However, these are some of the most common spam triggers that you should definitely avoid if you want any chance of getting into the inbox.

LEARN MORE: 10 Reasons Why Your Email Marketing Messages Are Not Reaching Your Recipients

Technically

Email service providers use a variety of technical settings to ensure that senders are who they say they are. For the best deliverability, you should send your email marketing messages from your own domain and make sure that all the necessary technical settings are set up correctly.

Here are some of the technical things you can set up to prove who you are to ESPs and improve deliverability:

• DNS (Domain Name System): Your email address is matched to your domain name and a DNS text record is used to match it to a sending IP address.
• SPF (Sender Policy Framework): This text file shows email clients the IP addresses that are allowed to send email on behalf of your domain.
• DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail): This is a text file indicating that messages are not modified between the sending and receiving server.
• CNAME (canonical name): This is a text record that associates an alias with a real name (for example, www.yourcompany.com and yourcompany.com).
• DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance): This is a policy that tells email client messages that they are protected by SPF and/or DKIM.
• Sender Information: Your sender domain (e.g. yourcompany.com) should match your sender email address (e.g. john@yourcompany.com).

Don’t feel overwhelmed by all these acronyms! Configuring the technical settings is usually something you can work with your email marketing platform provider to accomplish. For example, if you subscribe to the Cannabiz Media License Database to send email marketing messages to hemp and cannabis license holders, you can work with the Cannabiz Media team to ensure all the technical elements are set up properly.

Key insights on getting your email marketing messages to inboxes, not spam

Email deliverability is a big topic and this article only scratches the surface. However, every little thing you do to show ESPs that you’re a good sender will help! Work on building and maintaining a positive sender history and reputation, segment your lists, personalize your message content, avoid common spam triggers and configure all your technical settings. It won’t be long before you start seeing better results from your email marketing investments.