How to Avoid Email Going to Spam: Land in the Inbox Every Time

An illustration of a person pulling an email symbol from the ground using a rope, symbollically representing the concept of "how to avoid email going to spam"If you want to avoid your emails going to spam, the most important thing you will need to learn is that the definition of spam isn’t what you think it is. At least not in practical terms. And this has a lot to do with how users, and inbox providers use the term.

You would think that it means that you sent an email to someone who didn’t ask to hear from you. However, this isn’t how people use the term. Nowadays it means “any email that annoys me, frustrates me and I no longer want to see”. Or even more broadly, “any email that I see no value in, and that I see as additional inbox clutter”.

Please note that users can, and do click that report button even if they asked to sign up for your list. Especially so if you don’t make it super obvious that they can unsubscribe with just one click. 

The inbox providers have adopted this definition as well. Basically, if the email is no longer wanted, your reputation drops. It doesn’t matter if you explicitly obtained permission to send emails to each and every subscriber.

Fortunately, the solution is easy if you just focus on implementing some basic principles, ideas and guidelines. And that’s just what we’ll go over in this guide.

Lack of personalization as the main source of “ick”

In the good old days of email marketing you could send the same email to everyone, and as long as they requested to hear from you, there wasn’t much of an issue. That time is long gone now. 

The internet user of today has become accustomed to personalization, to the point where anything that feels like “bulk messaging” can trigger a sense of unease. Even if the content is valuable, and even if they requested to hear from you.

That is to say, if it feels like “bulk mail” which you sent to 10,000 other people, then to them it “feels” like spam, even if it isn’t. Might sound unfair, but that’s just the reality of things.

Don’t fret though, personalization can be easy

You’re not required to achieve the kinds of hyper-personalized messaging you see the marketing gurus obsess about. You know what I’m talking about, the impractical idea where no two people get the same email on the same day.

There’s just no need to go that extreme. Even a little bit of personalization can go a long way. And you definitely want to start with the easiest and most basic stuff. Hint, it’s also the most effective.

I’m talking about at least implementing basic merge tags to refer to people by their name. This alone will go a great length to make sure people don’t get that “bulk mail” feeling when receiving your email. Simply referencing their name, or how they got on your list can do wonders.

But implementing segmentation is where it gets really fun

You should start acquiring additional data about your user over time, aside from just their name and how they signed up. This is where you truly deliver “relevant content”, that is sending the right content to the right person, at the right time.

The first thing you will want to do is check out our guide Email Segmentation Secrets: Tags, Lists, Segments, Explained. This will get you started off on the right foot. 

And once you have some of this segmentation data, you can give our smart personalization feature a spin. It’s super fun, I promise. And speaking of fun, you’re going to love our advanced segment builder

It allows you to build some really granular segments mixing and matching different criteria to create just the right segments needed to tailor how you deliver content and to whom.

Hold your excitement and avoid appearing spammy

It’s true that the top marketers in the world are able to write attention grabbing subject lines and email copy, and still waltz past the spam filters. However, copywriting is a skill that takes time to master.

What you’ll often find is that people who are new to email marketing will desperately try to get more attention, go over the top and resort to spammy looking subject lines and email copy. Without knowing it, they will end up using the exact words that trigger spam filters.

If this sounds kind of vague, I have some good news for you. Emercury has a built-in content checker. Just click this whenever you’re about to send or schedule a campaign. We’ll analyze the contents for you and let you know if your content is likely to trigger the spam filters.

Now, this isn’t to say you shouldn’t try to improve on your subject lines and copy. You should, and in fact that’s why we put out this very popular guide on subject lines to grow your business. In it, we show you how you can write effective subject lines, without venturing into spammy territory.

Your email reputation is everything

Just like in real life, your reputation determines how you get treated. Allow your reputation to go bad, and everything becomes so much more difficult. The same goes for the reverse, build a good reputation, and all of a sudden everything is much easier.

When it comes to your emails ending up in the spam folder, the main concept the spam filters deal with is called “your sender reputation”. This is just a fancy way of saying that they’re keeping an eye on you, and if you’re doing things the right way.

But what does that even mean? Well, they’re looking to see if your recipients are showing signals that they trust and like what you do. And while nobody knows the exact algorithms, it mainly involves your bounce rate, open rate, clickthrough rate, unsubscribe rates and more.

If you can hold up good rates in a steady manner, you’re going to be assigned a good sender reputation. Notice that I said “steady”, as it’s a very important metric.

You can’t just have a really good month, and then get set up as “one of the good ones”. Consistency is a huge part of your reputation, because it demonstrates the ability to provide subscribers with value on a consistent basis.

To learn more about these topics check What Is Email Reputation And How To Improve Deliverability?, as well as The One Secret To All Email Marketing Profits.

A clean, healthy, engaged list matters

It’s a normal human trait to get caught up in the size of things and prioritize quantity over quality. That happens a lot in email marketing where you see people obsessed with how big their list is. 

This often comes at the cost of creating a reputation destroying list that almost guarantees you land in the spam or promotional folder.

If you want to stay out of the sights of the spam filters, maintaining a healthy, clean list is a must. And while we have written separate guides on this, let me give you the quick rundown here as well.

Keeping a list clean 101

List hygiene is an absolute must if you want to stay out of the spam folder. This is often difficult for people because it involves getting rid of subscribers. 

It’s very easy to tell yourself that a subscriber that hasn’t engaged in 6 months “might change their mind any day and buy all my stuff”, but you’re just hurting your reputation. Unengaged contacts are not a net neutral.

For every email that these inactives fail to open, the inbox provider detracts a point from your reputation. The more unengaged subscribers there are on your list, the less likely your emails are to get delivered.

Just to make this absolutely clear: it means your emails in general. It’s not just that the inbox providers stop landing the inbox for the unengaged subscriber. It means even some of your biggest fans and most engaged subscribers will find your emails in the spam or promotional folder.

I hope you get why list hygiene and maintaining a clean list is absolutely essential. To learn more, check out The Power of a Clean List: How Email List Hygiene Drives Results – Emercury

Choosing a deliverability-focused platform matters

Let’s tackle one of the biggest misconceptions about ESPs (email sending platforms) first. A lot of marketers believe that if you send an email with a platform like this, it will get delivered.

This isn’t the case, in fact, no platform can guarantee delivery, even if you did all the required stuff like using double opt in, implementing all authentication measures and keeping a healthy, clean list. They are sending platforms, which means you’re paying them to send your email, and not necessarily deliver.

Sounds weird right? Especially if you’ve been under the misconception where sending emails is seen as synonymous with delivering emails. There’s no way for ESPs to guarantee that your emails get delivered for a multitude of reasons. One of which is that the spam filters sometimes just get it wrong. 

Even if you do absolutely everything right, the spam filters can still misplace your email and chuck it in the junk or promotional folder. In fact, as of writing this, it has been happening quite a bit recently, where even the best marketers with the best practices have seen an occasional email get lost to the spam filters.

Does that mean ESPs have nothing to do with deliverability?

Not so fast. While the ESP can not guarantee that your emails land, there is a huge difference between ESPs in how much they care about deliverability. A lot of ESPs don’t care much about deliverability. That is to say, they don’t focus much on either deliverability features, or helping you improve your deliverability practices.

This is because they have found it’s a lot more useful to bombard people with a flurry of new features and featurettes that don’t make a difference. That way they can nudge you into ever more expensive tiers to get access to the “super-duper amazing features that change everything”. Hint, they don’t.

And I say that because deliverability does in fact impact your bottom lines as a business in a very serious way. If you did nothing else but improve your deliverability, you would see a very drastic improvement in sales. And this is for the very simple reason that emails which do not get delivered, are never read, and can’t result in a sale.

And if that sounds paradoxical, remember that just because a platform says it sent 15456 emails for your last campaign, it doesn’t mean as many got delivered. 

Enter Emerury. We’re known as the platform that’s obsessed with deliverability. It’s in the very DNA of how we do everything. If you haven’t given Emercury a try yet, consider grabbing a forever-free account while we still offer those. Alternatively, consider booking a one-on-one demo with me, while I still have spots open.

Get A Strategic Partner On Your Side

There’s no need to go at this alone. While we do put out a lot of free content to help you, nothing beats a one-on-one conversation. In these articles we try to help clarify things as best as possible. However, every business is different, so we have to generalize.

If you want to understand better how to implement email marketing in your specific business, let’s have a chat. At the moment I am still able to do some free demos, so be sure to book one while I can still do these.

I would love to hear about your specific needs, challenges and any confusion you might have about email marketing strategies. And then, help you see how you can use Emercury to improve your bottom-line.

Alternatively, or in addition to booking a free demo, you can also grab a username for our forever-free-plan while we still have it. It’s probably the most generous email marketing automation plan on the planet. We include almost every feature in this plan, with very few restrictions.

Remember, you get to keep this plan for life, for free… Provided that you grab a username while registrations are still open. Note that we might decide to pull this way-too-generous offering at any point. So click that link to check if we still allow registrations.

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