My email keeps landing in spam!

There are three primary reasons your email lands in spam.

1. People marked your email spam (the infamous Gmail/Yahoo spam button strikes again)
2. Your email looks like spam (content)
3. Your domain or email server looks like a spammer (blacklists)

Details on a good workaround method are below!

Solve your spam filtering problem

Sending messages to your well intentioned but perhaps busy recipients risks your audience marking your messages as spam on purpose. Yes, that’s annoying. You’re trying to send them an important notice, perhaps an account update, and they mark your communication as spam.

Trash and spam buttons are close in Gmail

Lots of people mark legitimate email as spam. It’s almost impossible not to accidentally mark a legitimate email spam ever once in a while. However, certain audiences are more likely to do this regularly, and intentionally. If you identify recipients who mark your email as spam, remove them from your list immediately.

Yahoo! Mail’s spam button is clear, but close

Fortunately, Yahoo! Mail has clarified the spam button by putting the word Spam next to it. However, people may accidentally click it anyway. Or, your recipient may not care and do it out of convenience. It will, after all, shrink the amount of email that they have to read.

Short checklist to improve your email delivery

1. DKIM and SPF, check out this short description
2. Proper opt-in and full permission from every recipient
3. Get users to whitelist your domain
4. Make sure your email provider/IP isn’t blacklisted
5. Drop non-opens (low open rates kill deliverability)
6. Drop people who mistake spam for archive buttons

A quick spam folder workaround

Here’s a simple workaround. Set up a new, fresh email address and double email people to warn them that they should check their Spam folder.

Did you get my [other] email?

 

Please check your spam folder if it isn’t in your inbox.

 

Some People have had problems with my email going to the spam folder.

 

The spam button on Gmail and Yahoo Mail are very close to the archive and delete buttons.

 

Some folks accidentally hit the spam button on my email. Because people sometimes do that, it marks important legitimate email as junk or spam for my customers.

 

If my other email landed in your spam folder, please mark it as “Not Spam.”

 

This is very important if you want to receive email from me.

Use this image to help show them how to do that, if you like.

You can send them another email, at another time, asking them to mark all your email as whitelisted.

Unsubscribe headers avoid spam complaints

Placing unsubscribe headers in your email (even one to one email) can help avoid spam complaints. If someone clicks the spam button (even inadvertently) it will ask “unsubscribe or report for spam” if you have those headers in your email.