Emails go to junk/spam folders

One of the greatest problems facing CRM and engagement software like vega is making sure that your email goes to the user's inbox instead of going to the junk folder, truly, how many of us check our junk or spam folders regularly?

There are things that vega does to help with this by using multiple IP addresses for sending emails and authenticating your domain with our email provider, SendGrid. 

Sender reputation and the inbox delivery rate is also affected by your own domain SPF record and email lists being targeted. See the article here detailing all aspects of email security, to ensure you are doing everything to improve your sender reputation.

Tip No 1: "Clean" Your Email List
Most, if not all, email providers' spam filters penalise your domain or IP with a higher spam score (meaning there's a higher possibility of your emails going to junk folder) if they see that you are sending emails to bad email accounts. A bad email account is an address that doesn't exist, has been disabled or has a full inbox. These addresses should be cleaned from your email list regularly to avoid this. If you allow them to add up on your list, you will eventually be flagged as a spam provider.

Tip No. 2: Encourage your contacts to trust you

With email, things don't happen overnight, and magic wands are few and far between. So for the most part, the actions of your recipients are the highest voice of authority.

Encouraging your recipients to do certain things can help bolster the trust of your email domain and your messages. Some examples can include:

• "Add us to your address book!" - Having a recipient add your from address to their address book or trusted senders list can go a long way. More often than not, if one of your recipients trusts a sender, they will be more lenient to similar messages to different recipients. Use every opportunity to encourage those on your email list to add you as a contact. A typical way to ask contacts to do this is to say, "Ensure that you continue to receive the quality information from us that you enjoy by adding us to your contact list."
• Star or Mark as important - A simple inbox action like this is just another way your recipients can tell their mail providers that "Hey, I want these messages".
• "If you don't receive an email right away, please check your spam folder and mark "not spam" - Adding this simple sentence to your sign-up form area can solve a lot of potential heartache. If a message you sent ends up in the Spam folder, and the recipient manually goes in and pulls it out, that's fantastic! This not only helps incoming mail filters in avoiding false positives, but also improves your email delivery standing.

Tip No. 3: Test Your Email

Before you send your email campaign, send a test message to each of the big email providers (Hotmail, Yahoo, MSN, Gmail, and one generic office address that is viewed in an Outlook client). If the test ends up with most of your emails going to the junk folder, then it means you'll likely end up in junk mail for your actual email campaign also. This email test means that you can try different subject lines and email content to try to figure out what sent you to spam.

Also, there are some great 3rd party services you can use to get an idea of how mail providers analyze your emails:

• http://isnotspam.com

• http://www.mail-tester.com/

Tip No. 4: Don't Use "Big Images"

Embedding images in email is not totally a bad idea, but sending an email that's all one big image file definitely is, for many reasons. Foremost among reasons is that spam filters look for those types of image-based emails. Big image files often carry hidden messages that would normally get caught in spam filters (words like "free"), so, when a spam filter can't read any real text in an email and only sees an image, it assumes the worst.

Tip No. 5: Don't Sound Like a Spammer!

The more "spam-like" text and phrases your email uses, the less likely it is to end up in the inbox. There are a number of free software solutions to check the "spam score" of an email before you send it, but there are also basic rules.

• Don't use the word "free" too many times.
• Don't use ALL CAPS.
• Don't use lots of coloured fonts.
• Only use one exclamation point at a time!
• Stay away from words you'd see in spam: medicine drugs, a guaranteed winner.