Although it is not always possible to control whether you stay out of the SPAM folder, there are there are a number of best practices that we use, and a number of things that you can do to at improve your deliverability.
For us, we actively manage the excellent sending reputation of our sending IP addresses, and make sure that none of our customers are adversely affecting other customers.
Here are some of the things that you can do to improve your odds of staying out of the SPAM folder.
Email Content #
Text #
Avoid spammy words.
Don’t use HTML and CSS to hide content in your messages. Hiding content might cause messages to be marked as SPAM.
Message subjects should be relevant and not misleading.
Our pre-written template content is tested using email content testers to ensure a low SPAM score.
Links #
Links in the body messages should be visible and easy to understand. Recipients should know where they go when they click links.
Research has shown that the more links that your email has, that the higher likelihood that the content will be marked as SPAM.
Our best practice is to use 3 or fewer links in emails.
Images #
The fewer images the better. At most one is best.
Gmail Specific #
Gmail uses artificial intelligence to determine whether your message should be considered as SPAM.
This is determined on an individual level, as well as an aggregate level, so that your SPAM threshold for certain emails will be different than someone else’s, but also that the behavior of many people on an email message sent from a marketer will change that threshold.
Training your Gmail account #
You can train your Gmail account to categorize your email as not SPAM by moving it from the SPAM folder into your Inbox and starring it to mark it important.
By doing so each time your email goes into the SPAM folder, eventually Gmail will stop sending those emails from you to the SPAM folder AND it will give Gmail a clear signal that this is not SPAM to other people receiving this email from you.
It may take several tries for this training to become successful.
Similarly, if Gmail is moving your emails to the Promotions folder you can follow the same procedure to train Gmail to not do so by moving mails into your Inbox.
Domain Authentication #
For customers who have been with us for a while we offer an advanced domain authentication service that significantly improves the deliverability of your campaign email.
The prerequisites are:
1) that you set the from email address on your campaigns to use an email address from your own domain (instead of gmail.com, or yahoo.com)
For example: bob@webuyhouses.com and not webuyhouses@gmail.com
2) that you have access to create CNAME DNS records on the domain of that email address.
3) you are on an annual plan, or have been an active customer for at least 3 months.
Please get in touch with support to enable this feature.
