How Email Filtering Works
Spam Fact: 91% of cybercrimes start with an email.This thing we call spam, unsolicited and unwanted junk email, accounts for more than a quarter of all email traffic. So it is essential that your ISP has tools in place to keep spam emails in check. Your ISP wants to keep your business secure and your inboxes as spam-free as possible.Every email that arrives in your inbox goes through a filtering process that reviews it for legitimacy and any malicious cues. If the email does not pass the filtering process, it gets placed in one of two places: your junk folder or your quarantine folder if its malicious.Although only one out of every hundred emails are malicious, it only takes one to send your organization spiraling into a frenzy. Its a really good thing that most of those emails are filtered out before you ever see them!Before reaching your inbox, each message must pass through three different sets of criteria filters with your ISP. These criteria are:
Why Are My Mailchimp Emails Going To Spam
Mailchimp is an email marketing service provider that gets so much buzz nowadays and for a good reason. For one, you can send as many as 10,000 emails per month for up to 2,000 contacts for free!
It also helps email marketers design newsletters, integrates them with services they already use, shares them on social networks, and tracks results. This platform is an all-in-one email publishing platform.
With Mailchimps professional-looking templates and drag-and-drop builder, you can save time optimizing your emails and focus more on engagement.
However, despite being a good email marketing tool, Mailchimp emails may land in your subscribers junk or spam folders instead of your subscribers inboxes.
And you are left wondering, why does this happen when Im sending campaigns with Mailchimp, even though Im not a spammer? Well, thats what were going to find out today.
So, without further ado, lets dive into how to fix Mailchimp emails going to spam and ways to avoid it from happening to finally streamline your email marketing efforts!
Youre Sending Your Emails To Inactive Addresses
We think youve seen a message like this at some point.
That means your email was sent to an inactive address and thus not delivered. If you send bulk emails and consistently send emails to inactive email addresses, spam filters will penalize your domain or ISP .
Thats why you should continually clean your email list and delete inactive addresses.
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Provide An Email Preference Center
Preference centers provide new and existing subscribers with the freedom to adjust how often they receive your emails. By providing a preference center that puts recipients in control of how and when they are contacted, you reduce the risk of having subscribers mark your emails as spam.
Reduce friction by making the preference center prominent and easy to access. Removing obstacles like this can actually help to increase your engagement rates and keep your messages in the inboxes of engaged recipients. Learn how to perfect your preference center.
Who Are Millennials And Why Should You Care About Their Consumer Preferences
A single generation is revolutionizing sales. Social media, telvision, mobile devices, and the internet mean they enter the marketplace fully aware that everything and everyone around them is out to sell them something. And they’re eager to buy.
Millennials are the single largest consumer segment in the market today, holding both massive buying power and unprecedented influence. According to a recent Nielson report, they spend $65 billion a year and influence over $1 trillion in total consumer spending.
Is your business prepared to capitalize on their enormous spend? Discover five business “must haves” to engaging the growing millennial mindset in this free resource guide.
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Ways To Prevent Your Emails From Triggering The Spam Filter
Luckily, there are some ways to prevent your emails from getting thrown into the spam folder.
And even if your account has already been marked as suspicious or spammy, there are still some things you can do to remedy the situation.
The most effective way to avoid triggering the spam filter is to use a trustworthy piece of outreach software, like Respona.
High Rates Of Manual Spam Flags
If youre constantly getting emails from a given source, you have the power to manually flag it as spam. As a first line of action, this will forward the senders future emails to you to the spam folder automatically.
If too many users in your sending list manually mark your messages as spam, you could become blacklisted. Dont worry about one or two flagsyoull need to meet certain thresholds before any organization takes action against you.
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Youre Not Learning From Your Mistakes
We already touched on the importance of adding an Unsubscribe button. But its such an essential concept that we need to dive deeper into why its crucial.
No matter how valuable you think your email campaigns are, you still need to give your subscribers a way out. If you dont, you could get spam complaints at best, or slapped with thousands of dollars in fines at worst.
At the bottom of your emails, include an unsubscribe link or a similar opt-out feature.
But, again, you already knew that. So why are we bringing it up now?
Because you should use these unsubscribes as an opportunity to boost your engagement rates in the future.
For example, you can send an unsubscribe confirmation email whenever a user opts-out of your list. In that email, you can include a survey to figure out why your customer didnt want to be on your list.
With that information, you can start customizing your email campaigns to prevent similar subscribers from leaving your newsletter. In other words, youre simply learning more efficiently from your mistakes.
Your Emails Are Image
Email marketing is slightly different from other marketing channels. Although images do play a big role in it, they cant dominate your newsletters.
Many email marketers make this mistake: they pack their email templates with images, to make them look nicer, and spend less time coming up with the sales copy.
Heres one such example from a renowned brand. Notice that even though theres text in the email body, its still part of an image.
This may seem like a good strategy after all, people like images and can read the text even when its part of an image.
But there are two problems with this approach.
One is that, unless you provide the ALT text to your image, consumers that use screen readers may have trouble reading your content. Plus, with so many email clients blocking images automatically messages that dont have the ALT text provided look rather unappealing.
Just like it would be with the following email.
The second one is that ISPs like Gmail or Outlook see this a bit differently.
Lots of heavy images make heavy emails and ISPs want to process as many emails as possible. By making your newsletters image-heavy, youre making this process more difficult and resource-consuming. And because of that, they may choose to filter your messages less favorably and place them in the spam folder or even bounce them.
In general, the more text or the higher its ratio compared to images the better.
So what should you do, when images need to be part of your email template?
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There Are Grammar And Spelling Errors
This may not seem like a big deal, but having a poorly written email is another reason why Mailchimp emails land in the spam folder. Scammers historically dont bother perfecting the grammar and spelling of their emails when attempting to exploit people, however this gap is closing and makes it even more important to raise the bar on your email copy to avoid the spam filters.
Aside from giving priority to your email design, we suggest you avoid all of these:
- flashy color and big fonts,
- a lot of $ signs and exclamations ,
- and poorly written email copy
Dont Use A Personal Account Like Gmail To Send Marketing Emails
If youve been getting less spam in your inbox lately, you can thank DMARC. Read this post, DMARC Policy Could Impact Your Email Deliverability, if you want to know all about what DMARC is and what it stands for .
But if you can only manage a few paragraphs on this topic, heres what you need to know: If youre sending mass marketing messages from a personal account like Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail, youre not DMARC-compliantand therefore, your emails may be headed straight to the junk folder.
Say youre using a platform like Keap to send email from an address like . Gmail knows youre not actually sending email from its server. It thinks youre spoofing, tricking recipients into thinking the email came from somewhere it didnta tactic spammers use to imitate people and companies. As a result, Gmail blocks your email from its users inboxes as a protective measure.
Fortunately, the solution to DMARC compliance is relatively simple: Get your own domain name to send emails from an address like . Domain names are available from and other providers for as low as $12 annually.
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Domain Reputation Is Poor
Your domain reputation plays a vital role in your email deliverability. To borrow an analogy from the finance world, it is a lot like a credit score for your email domain. If it is high, you will get good deliverability.
That said, let’s deconstruct what are the factors that contribute to it.
Using a free email address as your From Email address
If you are not using an ESP then you will need your own domain to send emails. The reason you can not use a free email address inside a 3rd party system is that they have strict DMARC policies.
If you have your own domain you can set DMARC policies that will tell receiving servers how to handle emails that have failed the DMARC check.
Inconsistent Email Volume
This again is the typical behavior of a Spammer. Also, can you think of a legitimate business that will suddenly increase their email volume by 100x?
Sudden changes in email volume are always considered suspicious in the email world.
People marking emails as SPAM
This should not come as a surprise. If people mark your emails as SPAM, your domain reputation will get affected.
When your subscribers click on Mark as SPAM, a SPAM complaint is logged by mailbox providers like Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Outlook, etc. notifying ESP’s about the same.
Since SPAM complaints are an explicit user signal about unsolicited emails .
Email Design Doesnt Follow The Protocols
Use of Images
- Maintain a balance ration or text to image
- Avoid image only emails
- Use alt text when embedding images.
Spammers tend to hide all SPAM trigger words in an image and use the email body for neutral words only. Since most SPAM filters do not process the image it gets past them. So, an email with a really skewed ratio of Image/Text can start getting flagged by SPAM filters.
Some users don’t allow images in emails to load. The images in your email wont show to them, making your email look spammy and getting marked as spam. SPAM filters will take this feedback and over a period of time will start considering most of the emails with a similar signature as SPAM.
Non-responsive email design
This in itself will not directly cause your emails to land in SPAM.
That’s why all email templates inside SendX are responsive by default. Not only that, we have created one of the biggest responsive email templates resources on the web . It’s available for free.
Example of Non-responsive Email Design
Using iframe tag, flash, HTML forms, unsupported HTML tags, CSS attributes, javascript
Email HTML is NOT equal to Web HTML.
There are a lot of obvious HTML tags and CSS attributes that are not supported by major email clients .
Avoid embedding forms in your email. The submit button of the form will require you to use JavaScript .
Missing key elements
If you miss adding key elements like :
- from name
- email body
- plain text version in your email
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Audience Wants Html Format Emails
Maybe your segmented audience prefers to get emails in HTML format and your emails don’t follow that format!
In that case, you should
- Make sure that your HTML code is simple and clean. Stay away from complexity.
- Never send image-only emails with no text and of course, compress them for the ideal size.
- Use fonts that work across platforms, unknown fonts dont work everywhere.
- Make sure that your emails are mobile responsive.
Reason #: Too Many Of Your Emails Bounce
A bounce happens when your email isnt delivered to the recipient for one reason or another.
This could be because you sent it to an invalid address, one that is not being used anymore, one thats too full to receive new emails, or one that you simply dont have permission to write to.
But how is it spam if your emails arent even being delivered?
Internet service providers actually keep track of your deliverability, and if it gets low, to them its a sign that youre guessing email addresses, and doing something shady or spammy.
The easiest way to fix this and keep a good reputation is to verify your email list regularly. ZeroBounce CEO, Liviu Tanase, suggests an email verifier removes invalid addresses and prevents bounces. Also, it can detect other harmful contacts, such as abuse emails or spam traps, thus helping you boost inbox placement,
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Youre Using Spam Trigger Words
Some spam filters are triggered by specific words in the subject line or the body of the email. Some spam trigger words are:
- Amazing
- This is not spam
- Winner
Your email provider may have a built-in tool that checks your emails for spam trigger words before sending it.
Keep in mind that the above trigger words are common examples. They may not be specific to your email service provider, however.
So be sure to contact your provider directly to see if certain words trigger spam flags. Make a list of words to avoid in your subject line as your crafting your email copy.