Why is your email ending up in SPAM? (and how to fix it!)
Posted: Sun Jan 05, 2025 8:19 am
The problem is not with email itself, it is with what people do with it.
Creating an email is sending the right message to the right person at the right time.
If your email arrives in SPAM, it may be because of your message
Businesses overuse email marketing or prospecting email so much that email service providers must constantly strengthen their deliverability rules.
All this to say that the number of emails arriving in SPAM is increasing.
Your email arrives in SPAM? Your sender reputation is at stake
To deliver an email to the inbox or send it to SPAM, messaging services rely mainly on your sender reputation.
Sender reputation is a rating that is given to your domain name.
If your sender reputation is good, no problem. If it is bad, your email is more likely to end up in SPAM.
Why your sender reputation is not good?
I'm going to tell you a story.
One day, a company contacted me because all the emails that honduras email list employees sent were arriving in SPAM.
When I say all, I mean all.
Even the emails that employees sent to each other.
It took me 5 minutes to figure it out: by looking at their Marketing and Sales mailings, I could see that this company was sending promotional emails several times a week to thousands of addresses found here and there.
The worst part of all this is that this company was an ESN (IT agency!).
Do you see where I'm going with this?
If your emails are arriving in SPAM, chances are you have sent them in bulk, without authorization, in the past.
To go further, here are 7 bad practices to avoid to avoid ending up in SPAM.
7 Bad Emailing Practices That Send You to SPAM
1. You send emails without consent
The CNIL and GDPR guidelines require you not to send emails to people who have not given you their express consent.
Unfortunately, I still get them every day.
I don't read them and put them directly in the trash. Sometimes I report the sender as SPAM. All this degrades his reputation as a sender.
send email with permission
Sending an email without permission will penalize your strategy
Email is not meant to generate leads. It is meant to fuel the purchasing thinking of the leads you have generated naturally .
2. You don't provide value
We receive dozens of sales and marketing emails per week. If not per day.
Our selection is therefore very strict.
If you don't provide value to your recipients, they won't read your emails and will delete them.
This low engagement negatively impacts your sender reputation and naturally your return on investment.
To learn more about this point, I suggest this article: How to bring value with your Emailing?
3. You don't know WHO your target is
To send an email that provides value, you need to know who your target audience is.
I did say "Who". Between "which" and "who" the nuance is fundamental:
Providing value means answering the questions your target audience is asking and providing solutions to the problems they encounter on a daily basis.
The work of Marketing Personas is essential.
4. Your email is not Responsive
You read it everywhere and you only have to look at your own behavior to see it: we are increasingly reading our emails from our smartphones.
If your email doesn't display optimally on mobile, it will be read much less and will often end up in the trash.
You know the rest: your sender reputation is impacted and your email is more likely to end up in SPAM.
5. You never clean your base
In 1 year, 20% of the email addresses in your database are no longer valid. This statistic should be enough to convince you to clean up your database. But I'll go further.
I regularly come across companies that keep all of their email addresses, even those that don't check any of the emails they send them.
What's the point of sending an email to someone who won't read it?
Simply damaging your sender reputation.
So remember to sort your database regularly. For example, if someone hasn't opened our last 10 emails, we send them a Break Up email offering to unsubscribe.
If there is no response, we will remove it from our database.
6. The Text to Image ratio of your email is not good
Contrary to what some "experts" may claim, integrating images into an email does not cause it to end up in SPAM.
What increases your chances of ending up in spam is an unbalanced Text to Image ratio.
Concretely, the text must occupy a volume greater than the images in your email.
If this is not the case, your email will probably end up in SPAM.
7. You don’t have an Email Marketing strategy
More generally, the problem you encounter if you are not generating a return on investment with your emails comes from the fact that you do not have a strategy.
Email doesn't work if you send one every now and then, when you have a moment and something to sell.
Email must be part of a strategy that aims to effectively fuel your prospects' purchasing thinking.
Creating an email is sending the right message to the right person at the right time.
If your email arrives in SPAM, it may be because of your message
Businesses overuse email marketing or prospecting email so much that email service providers must constantly strengthen their deliverability rules.
All this to say that the number of emails arriving in SPAM is increasing.
Your email arrives in SPAM? Your sender reputation is at stake
To deliver an email to the inbox or send it to SPAM, messaging services rely mainly on your sender reputation.
Sender reputation is a rating that is given to your domain name.
If your sender reputation is good, no problem. If it is bad, your email is more likely to end up in SPAM.
Why your sender reputation is not good?
I'm going to tell you a story.
One day, a company contacted me because all the emails that honduras email list employees sent were arriving in SPAM.
When I say all, I mean all.
Even the emails that employees sent to each other.
It took me 5 minutes to figure it out: by looking at their Marketing and Sales mailings, I could see that this company was sending promotional emails several times a week to thousands of addresses found here and there.
The worst part of all this is that this company was an ESN (IT agency!).
Do you see where I'm going with this?
If your emails are arriving in SPAM, chances are you have sent them in bulk, without authorization, in the past.
To go further, here are 7 bad practices to avoid to avoid ending up in SPAM.
7 Bad Emailing Practices That Send You to SPAM
1. You send emails without consent
The CNIL and GDPR guidelines require you not to send emails to people who have not given you their express consent.
Unfortunately, I still get them every day.
I don't read them and put them directly in the trash. Sometimes I report the sender as SPAM. All this degrades his reputation as a sender.
send email with permission
Sending an email without permission will penalize your strategy
Email is not meant to generate leads. It is meant to fuel the purchasing thinking of the leads you have generated naturally .
2. You don't provide value
We receive dozens of sales and marketing emails per week. If not per day.
Our selection is therefore very strict.
If you don't provide value to your recipients, they won't read your emails and will delete them.
This low engagement negatively impacts your sender reputation and naturally your return on investment.
To learn more about this point, I suggest this article: How to bring value with your Emailing?
3. You don't know WHO your target is
To send an email that provides value, you need to know who your target audience is.
I did say "Who". Between "which" and "who" the nuance is fundamental:
Providing value means answering the questions your target audience is asking and providing solutions to the problems they encounter on a daily basis.
The work of Marketing Personas is essential.
4. Your email is not Responsive
You read it everywhere and you only have to look at your own behavior to see it: we are increasingly reading our emails from our smartphones.
If your email doesn't display optimally on mobile, it will be read much less and will often end up in the trash.
You know the rest: your sender reputation is impacted and your email is more likely to end up in SPAM.
5. You never clean your base
In 1 year, 20% of the email addresses in your database are no longer valid. This statistic should be enough to convince you to clean up your database. But I'll go further.
I regularly come across companies that keep all of their email addresses, even those that don't check any of the emails they send them.
What's the point of sending an email to someone who won't read it?
Simply damaging your sender reputation.
So remember to sort your database regularly. For example, if someone hasn't opened our last 10 emails, we send them a Break Up email offering to unsubscribe.
If there is no response, we will remove it from our database.
6. The Text to Image ratio of your email is not good
Contrary to what some "experts" may claim, integrating images into an email does not cause it to end up in SPAM.
What increases your chances of ending up in spam is an unbalanced Text to Image ratio.
Concretely, the text must occupy a volume greater than the images in your email.
If this is not the case, your email will probably end up in SPAM.
7. You don’t have an Email Marketing strategy
More generally, the problem you encounter if you are not generating a return on investment with your emails comes from the fact that you do not have a strategy.
Email doesn't work if you send one every now and then, when you have a moment and something to sell.
Email must be part of a strategy that aims to effectively fuel your prospects' purchasing thinking.