Why your emails keep going to spam

I’m not sure if this is a rant or not, but this keeps on happening with customers at RocketResponder. Almost every day we’ll get customers asking about emails being marked as spam. It’s true, if we have bad reputation your emails won’t get delivered. But for the most part it’s up to you.

1. Don’t send spam! It sounds simple enough, but if you are sending spammy content of course it will get filtered. Every person who has asked why their emails ended up in spam is sending emails that I would consider spam if I got one. Obviously their list subscribed so hey they want the emails, but the primary filters are looking at overall email quality, if they see you look like spam, they’ll think it’s spam.
2. Click Not Spam!!  This again sounds simple, but the people asking say they always goto spam. Especially with Gmail, secondary filters learn what the end user sees as spam or not spam. So if you see an email is in spam, and aren’t clicking not spam, it thinks it was right that the email was spam. Its the same reason if you don’t mark an email as spam you’ll start to get more spam going to your inbox. It’s also the same reason that when I subscribe to these user’s lists, I get it to inbox while they still get it to spam!
3. Open your emails! This one is less known, but Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc monitor which emails you open. They care less about the content and more about engagement. If you want marketing type emails and are opening them, they want to put them in your inbox. The best way to help show your emails are wanted, is to actually open them yourself. Every email you don’t open is just re-confirming that you don’t really care if you get the email or not.
4. Click links in your emails! Similar to opening, they actually track if you are clicking links or not. Hotmail will go as far as to warn you if you click a link in an email that looks spammy and ask if you’re sure. Click yes you’re sure, it’s your email and it confirms that it’s legit.
5. Send emails people want! Obvious? yes but still people have this concept that if you “blast” enough emails you’ll get enough clicks to warrant the time sending the email. If this is your view, you’re going to get your emails filtered.

What people don’t seem to understand is that most email providers use reputation systems. For instance the from email address you are sending from. Or the links in your emails. I’ll bet they even track the address line that’s required by CAN SPAM. It’s no longer solely the responsibility of the ESP to get the email to the inbox which is why so many sketchy senders are finding their emails not going as far.

So I’m sure you’re wondering what we do at RocketResponder to ensure your emails aren’t being filtered because of other users. Well we do a few things:

1. We send the emails from your email address.
2. We use a different sub domain for every member for all links in the emails themselves.
3. We monitor engagement and group similar senders into different sending IP groups.
4. We monitor all our IPs against blackists and feedback loops and get notified every few hours of changes.

If you aren’t using RocketResponder then you should give it a try, we give you 30 days to try it out without paying or entering credit card info or even creating a Paypal subscription. You’ll also save some money too,  we charge $20 per 10,000 subscribers which is a huge bargain. Most other guys charge in 1000 subscriber increments, and they charge for unsubscribed users!