Why Are My Emails Going To Spam – Complete Guide

If your email campaigns are going straight to spam, then the chances are you’re doing something wrong. If your emails are automatically going to the spam folder, your target audience will never get a chance to see them. So, you must be wondering why are my emails going to spam.

There’s not a single reason that could be causing your email campaign to go to spam. In this guide, we’ll cover some top reasons why your email campaign is going to spam. That’s not all, we’ll also give you some tips on how you can reduce your risk of ending up in Spam. 

Importance of Emails Landing in Inbox

Think of it this way, every single email is a potential customer. When an email doesn’t reach the inbox, you’re losing a potential sale. On average, one out of every 6 emails sent globally land in the spam folder. 

So, you need to try to avoid as many spam folders as possible. To do this, you need to know why your emails are going into spam at all. I’m sure you’ve asked yourself “why are my emails going to spam?”.

One of the biggest reasons for your emails to go into spam is spam filtering. All email clients have improved their spam filtering features over the years. 

Some of the biggest email providers such as Google and Yahoo are trying their best to reduce the spam emails in the mail. Unfortunately, this sometimes causes legit emails to go into spam as well. 

Reasons Why Emails Go To Spam

There are a lot of reasons why your emails end up in the spam folder instead of landing in the inbox. Here are the top reasons:

1. Your Target Audience is Not Right

If your emails aren’t reaching the inbox, it could be because you have incredibly low engagement rates. This is caused when you have the wrong target audience in your email list. For example, emails for tax professionals vary greatly from emails to gyms.

While you do want your email list to be as big as possible, it should also be full of audiences that is actually interested in your products and services. If you have 10,000 people that are interested in your product and services, it would be more beneficial. Instead of having 100,000 email IDS that aren’t interested. 

2. You Don’t Have Email Permission

To make your email marketing campaign successful, you need to get the permission of those who you want to email. Oh and also, NEVER EVER buy a list of emails, if you’re caught, you can get penalized. You’ll be asked to pay a fine of $16,000 per email address.

To get email permission from your email list, you can put up an opt-in form on your website. It should clearly dictate that those who subscribe will receive promotional emails from your brand. 

If you violate the CAN-SPAM act, most of your emails will end up in the Spam folder, and you may be penalized. 

3. Your IP Address is Compromised

Even if you don’t use your email for spam, your emails still could end up in the Spam folder. It could be that your IP address was used for Spam in the past. 

If you’re sending your campaigns through an email marketing service, and if your email is delivered through their systems, it can affect you as well. Let’s say one of their clients uses the service just for spam. It will affect the deliverability of their other clients. 

You need to carefully choose an email marketing service provider. If you end up making the wrong decision, you’ll just be burning through your email marketing budget. 

4. Low Engagement Rates

Having high engagement rates I very very important for your brand. Top webmail providers check for how many emails have been opened and how many emails are deleted. This is considered a factor for filtering spam emails.

If you have low engagement rates, and your emails are often deleted, then you’ll end up being flagged as spam from the email client. You need to make sure that you have high engagement rates. 

Other than targeting the ideal audience, you should also choose the right time to send your email. There are some other steps you can follow to improve your engagement rates. 

5. Misleading Subject Line

As per the CAN-Spam Act, any email marketer should not mislead anyone with their subject line to trick them into watching the message. In a survey, over 50% of all customers stated that they’ve felt tricked by emails. 

Some common misleading subject lines:

• Hey, Did I forget (keys, clothes, or any other items) at your home? This type of subject line can be used to trick the users into thinking the mail is from someone familiar. 
• Re: Currently in Office
• Urgent – Your Subscription is About to Expire
• Order Placed – Track Your Order

If you’re using any of these or similar subject lines, then most of your emails will end up in spam. So, the answer to your question “why are my emails going to spam?” is simple. You just need to be honest with your target audience. 

Ways to Avoid Emails Going to Spam

Now that you know some of the top reasons why your emails are landing in the spam folder, it’s time to know what you can do to avoid or fix that. Here are 5 tips to prevent going into spam. 

1. Target Ideal Customers From the Beginning

The best way that we can think of to reduce the spam rate is to target the right audience. If someone who’s already interested in your product/service receives your email, they’re more likely to open it. 

You’ll have to spend some time building a quality email list. But once you’re done, it will give you much better results than you ever expected. As an added bonus, you’ll be able to reduce the number of your emails going into spam. 

2. Use Double Opt-ins

Another way to make sure your emails don’t end up in Spam is to use the double opt-in feature. A double opt-in means that you confirm with your users twice before sending them an email.

This is a great option as sometimes users may end up clicking on the first button by mistake. Confirming it twice will help in filtering out the users who just clicked accidentally. 

Although, by doing this the number of people who’ll subscribe to your email newsletter will drop. 

3. Use WP Mail SMTP

You can even take help from external tools if you want. If you’re sending your emails directly through WordPress, then you need should try out WP Mail SMTP.

WP Mail SMTP is used by over 1,000,000 websites to make sure email campaigns are not being marked as spam. 

The best reason to use this tool is that it’s super easy to configure. The best part is that the team from WP Mail SMPT will set up everything for you. WP Mail SMTP will make sure that your emails are authenticated and sent via trusted sources. It would be best also if you use the DMARC report for your email protection deliverability’. 

4. Tell Your Subscribers to Whitelist Your Emails

When you send your first-ever mail to new subscribers, it would be wise to tell them to whitelist your emails. This ensures that your subscribers won’t report your email as spam. 

This will help you in multiple ways. It clarifies to subscribers that they’ll keep on receiving your emails. And, the more people are there in your whitelist, the better your brand reputation will be. It will also improve your overall delivery rates. 

It would serve you best if you do this in your welcome email. Doing this, later on, could suggest to your customers that your planning is not good. 

5. Teach Your Subscribers to Keep Email Organized

If your emails are important to your readers yet they can’t read them, it may be because these emails are getting buried under other emails. You can teach your subscribers to organize their emails into a particular folder. 

Some common things that you can teach to your team include:

• Build a special folder where you can archive emails after reading.
• Don’t set up filters to direct emails into folders. 
• After you’re done reading an email, manually move them into a specific folder.