All marketers wonder why their emails ends up in the spam folder and want to know how to reduce it. In this article, we’ll cover the basics, such as checking your spam rate and how to send an email that won’t trigger spam filters.
You’ve probably come across the concept of an email spam rate. Email service providers (such as Google, Yahoo, Outlook, AOL, etc.) have their own algorithms and assign numerical equivalent scores to incoming messages. These mechanisms include criteria of content evaluation and technical parameters.
If you receive a low score, your message will end up in the spam folder. That’s why it’s so important to understand the principles behind how your email gets rated as spam.
How to Check the Spam Rate of Your Email?
For each email campaign to succeed, you need to check the spam rate in advance. We recommend using the GlockApps service to track your spam score and other deliverability metrics. The Inbox Insight tool provides you with a list of seed email addresses to which you should send your test email. Once complete, you can click the View Report button to evaluate the detailed results. Also, the GlockApps spam tester conducts an authentication check of your domain: DMARC monitoring, SPF, and DKIM records alignment.
The Inbox Insight tool gives you a clear vision of your deliverability metrics and offers valuable tips to improve your inbox performance, which is very important in the success of your entire strategy.
How Do Spam Filters Work?
You need to understand that the success of your email marketing campaign depends to a large extent on the technology of spam filters and their algorithms. Filters are designed not only to block messages but also to organize them.
Many email service providers and clients nowadays divide your messages into conveniently separate categories: primary, social, commercial, and others. They use a number of specific criteria to properly evaluate the incoming message and place it in the appropriate folder.
These filters work in the same way to assign a spam score to messages. And if the score passes a certain threshold, the email goes to the Inbox. Otherwise, you can search for it in the Spam folder.
A number of spam criteria change and adapt on a daily basis, meaning that there is no set rule in this technology. For example, Google launched an AI-powered spam filter in its latest update to help Gmail users prevent excessive spam emails from reaching their inboxes.
Also, did you know that recipients can create their own rules to sort outgoing and incoming messages? For example, they can set a rule to never receive messages sent by certain recipients, or messages with suspicious attachments or URLs, in their primary inbox.
Filtering practices are usually not a publicized topic for security reasons, but there are still some general ideas about what they like and don’t like.
