Preventing Emails from Going to the Spam Folder

Preventing Spam Overview

Avoiding the spam folder is critical for maintaining strong relationships with your customers and maximizing the effectiveness of your email campaigns. When your emails land in spam, your customers might never see your promotions, updates, or important messages, which can lead to missed opportunities, reduced engagement, and potential loss of revenue. Ensuring your emails reach the inbox builds trust with your audience, keeps your brand top-of-mind, and allows you to maintain consistent, impactful communication. By staying out of the spam folder, you also protect your sender reputation, ensuring your future campaigns perform effectively.

As an email service provider, Yotpo sends marketing emails on behalf of your brand. Once these emails reach inbox service providers (ISPs) like Gmail and Yahoo, they are filtered according to each provider’s rules. Every ISP has its own set of guidelines for scanning inbound emails and sorting them using complex algorithms that are not public. However, there are some common reasons why emails end up in the spam folder.

In this article, you’ll learn what causes emails to go to the spam folder and how to prevent it.

Essential Understanding

To effectively prevent emails from going to the spam folder, it is crucial to understand the sender requirements by Gmail and Yahoo, the importance of reputation warming, the impact of email content, and the significance of deliverability metrics. Reviewing the following articles will provide you with a solid foundation:

• Meeting Google and Yahoo’s Sender Requirements

• Warming Your New Domain Infrastructure

• Complying with the CAN-SPAM Act When Sending Emails

• Adding Dynamic Content with Personalization Tags

• Improving the Health of Your Deliverability Metrics

Gmail and Yahoo Sender Requirements

Google and Yahoo’s updated sender requirements went into effect in February 2024. If you are seeing emails go to spam, make sure that you meet the requirements set in place by Gmail and Yahoo. To learn more, see Meeting Google and Yahoo’s New Sender Requirements.

Internal Emails

Brands often send test emails from Yotpo to their own domain to test messages. However, sending these emails to many recipients within the same organization can be flagged as a spoofing attack. To prevent this, the IT team needs to add the sending domain to the allowlist, ensuring the company's email system recognizes the messages as legitimate and does not treat them as spam.

Reputation Warming

If you're using a new sending domain, it's essential to warm it up before sending emails to a large number of recipients. This involves gradually increasing your email volume to build trust with ISPs and establish a positive sender reputation. Start by sending a small number of emails and slowly increase the volume over time. This will help guarantee that your emails are seen as legitimate and avoid being flagged as spam. To learn more about reputation warming, see Warming Your New Domain Infrastructure.

Email Content

The content of your emails plays a crucial role in whether they get flagged as spam. Image-only messages often end up in the spam folder. Ideally, your emails should be personalized and have a 60/40 text-to-image ratio. Additionally, make sure that the messages you send comply with the CAN-SPAM Act:

• Avoid false or misleading header information

• Don’t use deceptive subject lines

• Identify the message as an ad

• Include your physical address

• Provide a simple, reliable way for recipients to opt out of future emails

Tip:

To learn more about email compliance regulations and how to personalize your emails, see Complying with the CAN-SPAM Act When Sending Emails and Adding Dynamic Content with Personalization Tags.

Deliverability Metrics

ISPs use past performance metrics to evaluate a sender's reputation. Consistent engagement metrics, such as high open and click-through rates and low bounce and spam rates, reduce the chances of your emails being flagged as spam. Maintaining steady, positive performance is key to establishing a strong reputation. To learn more about managing your email deliverability, see Improving the Health of Your Deliverability Metrics.

Email Deliverability Dashboard

Yotpo offers a detailed view of your email campaigns' performance, enabling you to identify and address issues that could cause your emails to be marked as spam. It tracks key metrics such as open rate, click rate, unsubscribe rate, soft and hard bounce rates, and spam report rate, providing performance badges to highlight their health against industry standards. By monitoring these metrics, you can detect problems early, make data-driven adjustments to your email strategies, and benchmark your performance against industry averages. With this dashboard, you gain actionable insights to refine your email practices, reduce spam classification risks, and maintain a strong sender reputation. To learn more, see our article Email Deliverability Analytics Dashboard.