Today spam filters are intelligent, they work with AI technology. So, After they analyze billions and billions of email patterns, they can know if your email looks spammy or not so you need to stick to the rules and implement the perfect email.
Five things will decide if your emails will land in spam or in your inbox.
So let's not waste time and go directly to the point what are these five factors that determine if your emails will let in the spam or an inbox?
Let's start with Number one The spammy Subject line or the message content:
What does that mean? It's simply mean, The email you are sending contains spam triggers, bad words, spammy words and so on. That's why you need to stick to the rules and implement the perfect email.
So, Always test your subject line go to a free tool and check the subject line there also check if it's good or not.
Look at this subject line tester.
I got A & 94 points why?
Because simply I have no bad words, no spammy words. I have great punctuation. I have the best capitalization words and so on. So, always test the subject line before you send an email and about the email itself.
Please follow How To Write The Perfect Email That Converts? and always avoid any spam triggers.
So, this is the first factor in the subject line and the message content, always ensure to avoid any spam triggers in the subject line and the message.
Content Number Two, Your domain status:
Is your domain blacklisted? How do know this?
Just go to Free DMARC Domain Check and then enter your domain here like my domain SEO-guru.cyou and check if it's blacklisted or not.
If it is blacklisted your emails will probably land in spam because it's a blacklisted domain you are sending from a blacklisted domain.
In my case everything is ok so I don't need to worry about black listing but if your domain is blacklisted ensure to go to the company like semfresh or whatever blacklisting your domain and ensure to remove this domain.
An important point: Some fresh new domains will be automatically blacklisted for 30 days and after that, they will be removed automatically. This is only a precaution for new domains if your domain is somehow old and blacklisted go and check why it's blacklisted contact the company and ensure to remove it or simply use another domain where you wanna send emails.
Third factor: URLs in content of the email:
This is also very significant, especially to those who are promoting stuff in their emails and linking to other products if these are affiliate links, CPA links or whatever links promoting something you have to know that there's a high chance to be flagged as spam.
So, What to do in this case? How to promote your links in the emails?
Here, We have two choices: The first one is to create a post or a landing page about this product and host it inside your website on your domain and link to that landing page using your domain and not using the affiliate link and inside the landing page, people can by using the affiliate link then this is the best choice. The second choice is to mask or cloak the URL's What is URL cloaking? Please review it's very important to understand how you can cloak the URLs what is cloaking?
Simply is replacing the affiliate link with a normal URL like your domain website and then this URL will redirect automatically to the affiliate link but this URL inside the email message will look safe it's not affiliated it's nothing it's a normal URL that redirects later the user to an affiliate link this is what we call URL cloaking not shortening cloaking. So this factor number three is the URLs and links inside the emails.
Factor number four: Email Tracking
What is email tracking? What is tracking? I think you know it. Simply It is tracking when the user opens the link and click-through rates in your email marketing campaigns.
To understand, Why this may cause spam. Simply, How tracking works is, it adds some hidden images or hidden links inside your emails so when someone opens the email this image will load and this hidden URL will load and send a message to the server telling it that this email was opened so this is using hidden URLs and hidden objects inside the email and this may cause the emails to be certified as spam so What to do here?
Here, We have also two things to do the first thing you can do is to turn off tracking, if it's not very important for you, so you can avoid any special hidden links inside your emails. Now you may tell me I need to track my emails to understand how my campaigns are performing and you are right.
What you can do is to use a custom domain for tracking and not the same domain you are sending with and this is a very good practice to do and if you go now to any SMTP service like SendGrid like SparkPost or whatever company they will tell you to add a special domain for tracking.
So, it's a good practice to use another domain for tracking now if you are using email marketing services like MailChimp or Aweber you will not have this option they will track things for you but if you are using your own email marketing system then it's a very good practice (use a dedicated domain for tracking).
Factor Number Five:
I believe it's the most important in your reputation. Your sending reputation and your sending score are built upon mainly four things. The first one is sending score, always ensure to get almost ten over ten sending scores, when you wanna send a campaign. How to test your sending score?
Simply you can go to mailtester.com send a test email and check your score and check if there's any problem with your sending score this system service will give you a full report detailed report if there is any problem so always send a test email and check your sending score.
Number two which is very important, Warming up your SMTP.
If you are using your own SMTP server or using an SMTP service with a dedicated IP, warming up is crucial. It's a must you need to warm up and send emails gradually to build your reputation online.
We have two other things that are very important for your score for your reputation bounce rate and complaint rate. What is the bounce rate? Simply the number of emails that are bouncing back to your server. So you are sending two invalid email addresses, this will kill your reputation. Always ensure you have almost 0% to 1% bounce rate in your email marketing campaigns always validate your emails and to help you, you can get a free super email validator or you can simply get the best validation on H-supertools.com that has a free email validation service just go here to free email validation or bulk validation to validate your emails.
So, always ensure a maximum of 1% bounce rate and complaint rates is simply the number of people who are reporting you as spam. You know in Gmail or any email if you opened an email. If you click on the menu you can see report spam or report phishing. So anyone who is reporting you as a spammer. This will be bad for you now How to ensure low complaint rates? or almost 0% and complaint rates? target the correct people specific target and ensure to write the perfect email so people will not think you are a spammer. A good practice for you, when you write an email just send it to your inbox and sit down and look at your email put yourself instead of the recipient and read the email does it look spammy or not? if you say no perfect if you feel like 10% it may be spammy go and change your email in this way you can decrease the complaints rate by writing the perfect email and targeting the correct people.
So, these are the main five factors to ensure that your emails will land in inbox. Don't forget to Like my post & Follow me on Medium, GitHub & LinkedIn to get every new update almost every day.