How to Avoid the Spam Folder
When sending email campaigns one of the initial hurdles is avoiding the spam folder. Getting messages into the inbox, will significantly increase the email's opens and clicks, vastly improving your email's engagement and achieve the objective of raising the sender's profile.
With email marketing your initial objectives are
- getting the email accepted by the email host
- avoiding the spam folder
- get your email placed in the inbox
Here we are going to focus on how to avoid the spam folder. To avoid the spam folder there are three areas you need to check in every email marketing campaign. These are
- Content
- Sending Domain Setup
- Sending Server
- Content
- Fresh content
We advise on fresh content for your email. We see repeating content to the same audience having poor acceptance by email hosts and a very negative effect on the reputation of both your sending server and sending domain.
- Add image info
Images within emails have information associated with them that we call alternative text. This text is displayed as an alternative to the image. The alternative text will be visible before the recipient has pressed the 'Show blocked content' button in the email client. It's important to ensure you have alternative text, if there is no alternative text some email filters will mark your email down and you are negatively affecting your chances of inbox placement. Adding alternative text is an opportunity to engage with the email recipient, prior to them clicking in the 'Show blocked content' button, so use it to your advantage, use it to encourage interaction.
Images within HTML emails (99% of emails are now HTML, allowing you to format text and images)is essential
- No phishing here!
Email marketing software, like ZoomMail, will track the links within your email. They do this by re-writing your link, and recording who's clicked on the link before forwarding them to the intended website. So that the tracking information is still recorded, we recommend you don't put your website address, eg www.ZoomMail.co.uk, into the email text. Instead, use a phrase, for example 'click here to visit our website' and link this to your website. Otherwise, you risk displaying your website address (www.yourwebaddress.com) but the website link you go (www.tracking.com) to is not the same - this is phishing.
- Sending Domain Setup
- Who's sending?
Before your email is accepted, email hosts like to check your domain name
- Do you have permission to send emails for this domain?
The Sender Policy Framework (SPF) are settings within the sending domain's DNS (Domain Name Servers), that state they allow this server to send emails for this domain. We will show you how to check this setting later in this article.
- Can I see your ID?
The Domain Keys Identified Messages (DKIM) is a digital signature on the email, the receiving email hosts can check that. A positive check confirms the message is from the sending domain.
- Sending Server
The Sending Server settings will be setup by your ESP(Email Service Provider). But its always a great thing to check, we will cover some testing tools later in this article.
- Has the Sending Server's IP got a ReverseDNS?
Before your email is accepted, email hosts check your sending server's IP address. The first (and simplest) test the email hosts check is, does the sending server's IP address have a rDNS (reverse DNS setting). This is translating the IP address, 1.2.3.4 into the more friendly naming convention - eg ZoomMail's mail server 185.245.124.2 has the rDNS mail2.zoommail.co.uk. You can check the rDNS setting of your sending domain using the testing tools mentioned in "Testing, testing, testing" section
- Is the Server's IP listed on any blacklists?
Use the website - multirbl.valli.org - to check whether your Sending Server's IP is listed The Sender Policy Framework (SPF) are settings within the sending domain's DNS (Domain Name Servers), that state they allow this server to send emails for this domain. We will show you how to check this setting later in this article.
Test, Test, Test ...
A phrase used throughout the email marketing community is "Test, test, test". This refers to checking you do not fall foul of mistakes in the Content, Sending Details or Sending Server. Luckily there are free tools which can check the email's Content, Sending Domain and Sending Server. An example of two tools we regularly use and have integrated with ZoomMail are
Both the free tools, you send an email to them, they analyse it and report on the findings, checking the content, the sending email address and your sending server.
ZoomMail has integrated both the IsNotSpam and Mail-Tester tools. So, as soon as you have finished creating your email in ZoomMail, it's the click of a button to test your email.
Testing your email and fixing any issues that appear will help you Avoid the Spam Folder.
-
David Hazzard - 25-01-2025
