It can be difficult to know exactly why a particular email was sent to the spam folder. Anti-spam systems are complex, evaluate a large number of ever-changing criteria, and never disclose how or why they arrive at a particular decision (to prevent spammers from gaming the system). That said, there are steps you can take to help your campaign land in the inbox.
Adopt Best Practices
Take the time to review two important help articles:
- Mailing List Requirements. If you have contacts on your list that don't meet our requirements, remove them.
- Fundamentals and Best Practices teaches you how to build a successful email marketing mailing list. Learn and adopt the practices recommended in the article.
Improve Your Email Reputation
If your domain has a history of high spam complaint rates (anything over 0.1%), high hard bounce rates (anything over 5%), or high unsubscribe rates (anything over 1%), your email reputation might be suffering. Spam filters often take into account past performance and email reputation when judging an email. Your list might be too old or the contacts might not be opt-in. Your message may not be relevant to what your subscribers originally signed up for.
Boost Engagement
Another metric spam filters consider is engagement. In other words, have your recipients opened previous emails from you? Or have most of them just been thrown away or left unread? Consider retiring contacts from your list that have not engaged with you in a long time. This will help boost your open and click rates and improve the deliverability of future campaigns.
Check Spam Score
Run your message through our Spam Test to check for obvious issues that might be triggering spam filters.
Train the Filter
If your email landed in the spam folder, try moving it out of the spam folder and back to the inbox. This can be a signal to the spam software that this and future messages like it should not be considered spam.
Enable Email Authentication
Gmail, Yahoo, and many other mailbox providers now require that senders use email authentication technology. Learn how to enable email authentication for your domain.