7 reasons why your emails are going to spam!

You have probably already been in this situation, or are in it right now: the emails you send end up in your customers' spam folder! In this article, we share 7 possible reasons and the fixes that stop your emails from being treated as spam.

Email providers have recently become stricter about spam. As a result, emails that are not spam get flagged as spam, cutting off your communication with your customers.

1. Your IP address has been used to send spam

If your email is hosted on a server shared with other users, it is quite "normal" for someone else on the same server to have used it to send spam. If so, providers such as Gmail, Hotmail and others will mark that IP address as "bad", and every message coming from it will be treated as SPAM.

Fix: Ask your hosting or server provider to give you a unique, dedicated IP. Dedicated IPs usually cost extra, and the price varies from company to company, but expect around €10–15 a year.

2. Sending emails without permission

One very important rule: never buy email lists. These lists are usually sold many times over without the users' permission or consent. Users who never subscribed to a mailing list but receive your emails will report them. Your reputation with the main email providers will then drop, and you may be added to the spam list.

Fix: Do not buy email lists. Build your own list of subscribers.

3. SPF and DKIM authentication failures

Email authentication can take some work, but it is a necessary step if you do not want your emails marked as spam.

Email providers such as Google, Hotmail and Yahoo tend to mark unauthenticated emails as spam or fraud. These two authentication methods confirm that the message was sent by an authorised sender.

In short, it is possible to send an email as administrador@google.com by faking the sender. However, it would be marked as spam because we do not actually have access to that address. Many hackers use this method to pose as members of organisations they have no real access to, and so deceive the recipient.

SPF (Sender Policy Framework) "helps inboxes" by checking whether the email was sent from an IP address that is authorised to send it. This way, we can be sure the email came from a server or computer that is actually allowed to send email for that domain.

In the same way, DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) makes sure your email has not been changed in transit. It signs your email from end to end, which helps email providers see that the message is genuine and has not been altered.

Fix: If you use cPanel ®, go to "Email > Authentication", or ask your hosting provider for help.

4. Sending bulk campaigns

Want to promote a campaign or product to all your customers by email? Do not send it straight from your own email account! One of the biggest mistakes is using the email accounts you use every day to send email campaigns. Email providers will then start ignoring your important future messages, because they treat them as just another campaign. There are services built for this, such as Mailchimp and SendinBlue (you can send your campaigns without putting your email at risk).

5. Not including an unsubscribe link

One of the basic rules is to always give users the option to stop receiving your emails or campaigns (opt-out). If you do not, users who do not want your emails may report you as spam and, in the worst cases, may even take legal action.

Fix: Always put a link at the end or start of the email that lets users remove themselves from your email database.

6. Including suspicious words or file names

Some spam filters look at certain words or terms in your email subject, body or attachments, and check whether any of them could be linked to spam. Here are some examples:

Words or phrases such as: congratulations you have just won, winner, this is not spam, you own a check, you have won a prize, you are the winner of another prize.

Or files with names such as: document.pdf, document.exe, documento.pdf and similar.

Fix: Write unique, creative subject lines, and avoid large files or files with generic names (e.g. change invoice.pdf to invoice-123.pdf).

7. Few users open or read your emails

If you send emails to 10,000 users but only 10 open them, your audience may not be interested in reading them. Email providers such as Google, Yahoo and Hotmail check open and read rates, and if they are low, your emails may risk being sent to spam.

Fix: Clean up your email list regularly and check that your users are still interested in reading your emails or mailing lists.

We hope this article has been useful and that your emails never land in the spam folder again! 😃

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to get in touch!