12 Reasons Why Emails Go to Spam

Reading time6 minutes
Clayton Quist
Clayton Quist
Customer Service Genie

Understanding the reasons why emails go to spam is fundamental to avoid this problem in your company. Imagine you create amazing marketing campaigns, high-quality newsletters to engage with your target audience and they end up not even seeing them in their mail box. It will certainly damage your results.

Check out the article to learn what you should avoid doing, so you can increase email open rate, and conversion rates as a consequence.

12 Reasons Why Emails Go To Spam

1. You Don’t have Permission to Send the Email

Nowadays, it's possible to collect data online in multiple and ways, but having someone's email doesn't mean you should add them to your sending list automatically. On the contrary, ask permission to send emails must be a premise.

Customers may feel bothered by receiving unsolicited e-mails and add your contact to the spam list. Besides, it affects your brand image because it shows lack of respect for the customers.

Unsolicited emails won't have the results you desire while sending emails to people who allowed them can encourage customers to engage with your brand, and make purchases.

2. Your IP Address May Have Been Used to Send Spams

It’s possible that, at some point, your computer has been infected and your IP address has been used to send spams. This means that although you’re sending emails legitimately, your IP address is preventing them to arrive to the recipients correctly.

You can deal with this problem by using use services like MailChimp and ActiveCampaign, as they send emails through their servers, and have better digital protection against this type of attack.

3. Low Email Open Rates

One of the main reasons why emails go to spam is if your open rate is too low, and most of the recipients delete them even before opening them This indicates they are seem as irrelevant, so email services filters automatically classify them as spam.

Creating high-quality content that resonates with your target audience is necessary not to only avoid having your emails sent to spam, but to achieve your goals. Analyze your target audience behavior to understand what makes them open an email and read it till the end.

4. Recipients Mark Your Email as Spam

Even people who signed up to receive your newsletter may forget about it or find the content irrelevant, and end up marking your emails as spam. To stop this from happening, make sure your brand is well positioned in the body of the email, and use a font that’s evocative of your company.

You also need to remember to include the name of your company in the subject line. However, it’s possible that a client might still don’t want to receive your messages any more. Therefore, you should include an unsubscribe button in a visible place in every message, this is better them having your messages continually being send to spam.

5. Inactive Email Accounts

Another big reason why emails are sent to spam folders is the lack of activity on the emails on your list. One of the aspects analyzed by spam filters is if the email accounts you send messages to are active.

The more inactive accounts you have on your mail list, more likely your emails are to be marked as spam. Update your list regularly to avoid this and program you email marketing service to automatically remove email addresses that seem to have been abandoned.

6. Unclear Subject Line

If the reader doesn't find the subject line pertinent or seem it as suspicious, it's likely they will mark your email as spam. Write appealing subject lines that catch your target audience attention and is clear about the email content.

7. Untrustworthy Email Adress

If your email address seem unreliable, people might think the email is a virus, and send it directly to spam. It's important to use a corporate email with your company domain name. It adds credibility and also shows people they are receiving an email from a company they know.

8. Poor Email Content

The email content need to be interesting, otherwise they are likely to end up in the spam folders. Use a design that is aligned with your brand's visual identity, and investing on writing an engaging message that provides convincible reasons for recipients to read the email until the end and follow your call to action.

The image shows an open letter, and it's written "five star content"

9. Unclear Subscription Process

As well as creating an authorization form for sending emails, remember to go through the process as if you were a visitor to the page. Revise things such as the clarity of the text explaining the subscription to the newsletter, and if you’ve got your logo and the right images on the form as well as in your emails.

If the subscription isn't clear it may cause customers to indicate unsubscribe and send your messages to spam

10. You’Ve Written Words Commonly Used By Spammers

Some words have been so much used by spammers that they are now seen as warning signs for spam filters. Emails with words and terms such as ‘free’ or ‘congratulations’, ‘this isn’t spam’ and ‘great offer’ are analysed even more carefully by filters before they are sent to people’s inboxes, or even automatically sent to spam folders.

11. The HTML Code of Your Emails Isn’t Well Built

For businesses that only send emails containing text, this isn’t a problem. However, if you send emails with HTML code in them, you need to be careful. Badly constructed codes can mean the filters of email services will mark your emails as spam.

Good practices for HTML code in emails include: a clean code that is as short as possible, images between 600 and 800 pixels, a mixture of text and images, and emails that are optimised so that they can be seen on mobile devices.

12. Using a Free Email Service

Even if your business is just starting out, don’t use free email marketing services. Most basic plans from the best web hosting services allow you to create corporate emails, and they aren’t difficult to set up. Before putting your email marketing plan into action, make sure your company has its own email account.

In the image it's written yourname@companyname.com

Create Email Marketing Strategies

Email marketing is one of the of the most effective ways to engage and convert leads into loyal customers, once you know why emails go to spam and implement effective strategies to prevent it, you will see considerable improvement on the results.

One way of getting new subscribers to sign up is by using Jivochat’s pre-chat forms, which is one of the many features of our online chat service. You can personalize the form to fit your needs better, and attract leads.

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