Boost Your Email Deliverability: Strategies to Avoid the Spam Folder

Every once in a while, I peek into my “SPAM” folder to see what’s landed there.

I always find the usual suspects:

• A phishing email or two.
• An email from someone who wants me to hire them to grow my Instagram account.
• A random email from a platform I stopped using years ago…
• … and then there are the marketing emails from coaches & service providers whose email lists I’ve opted into because I wanted to learn more from them.

Now, those coaches & service providers definitely didn’t intend to land in my SPAM, but for some reason, Google’s filters decided their emails were SPAM and kept them out of my inbox.

First things first – if you look in your SPAM right now and see an email from a coach or service provider, do them a solid and move their email out of SPAM and into your inbox. This will prevent their future emails from being flagged as SPAM.

If YOU’RE worried your marketing emails might be landing in SPAM boxes… we need to make sure that doesn’t happen.

START HERE → Have you authenticated your sending domain? If you haven’t authenticated your domain in your email service provider yet, you need to stop reading this, go read this, and do that RIGHT NOW. This should be your #1 priority before sending any more marketing emails. Once that’s done, come back and finish this article.

NEXT → set yourself up on gmail.com.postmaster so you can keep an eye on your Google sending reputation.

Here are a few more things I’m changing about my email marketing strategy to ensure the spam bots don’t flag my emails and tarnish my domain’s reputation.

I’m changing how I share the link roundup in my weekly Sunday newsletter.

Previously, I had been sharing multiple links in the newsletter – like sometimes close to 20 links. Instead, I’m going to share as few links as possible! This will make my emails less likely to trigger spam filters.

To do this, I created a page on my website to highlight the links from my latest newsletter, and I’ll share that link once in the email for anyone interested in exploring further. Check out the page I created here.

I’m going to limit the number of images I use in my emails and switch to sharing a URL for GIPHY images.

This one is not good news for Flodesk users – the fancy “segments” that you’re adding to your emails are actually all image files and could impact your deliverability.

Speaking of images – use JPEG files instead of PNG and compress them for faster loading times. The longer an image takes to load, the more likely it will be flagged as spam. Be sure to add alternative text to all of your images as well.

I’m changing the language on my buttons & links.

Instead of linking trigger words such as “click here” and “free,” I’ll link less spammy-sounding words and use buttons to clearly indicate where I want the reader to click. If you’re wondering what words might be tagged as trigger words, you could try out this checker tool.

I’m going to clean my list more often and will remove anyone who has not opened any emails after 60 days.

I have an automation set up in ConvertKit to check if any emails have been opened 60 days after a subscriber first opts in. If they haven’t, a short & sweet 2 email re-engagement sequence will be sent out, and if there is no response, they’ll automatically be removed from my list. Doing this will keep my open rates high (you should aim for over a 50% minimum open rate on your emails) and ensure my sender reputation stays pristine!

I’m going to stay consistent with sending regular emails to my list and use smart segmentation to ensure my emails are sent to those who will get the most value from them.

Consistency > Frequency, but if you CAN maintain a minimum frequency of 1 email a week, this is optimal!

If it’s been a while since you’ve emailed your list, now is the perfect time to get yourself back on track. Check out this post for some tips on how to rekindle your email list without being weird.

Finally, a reminder that the most unhelpful thing you can do is ghost your email list. The fewer times you email your list, the more likely you’ll end up being marked as spam when you do send an email (people will forget why they subscribed), you’ll get more hard bounces (bad for your reputation), and you’ll miss out on an opportunity to build a relationship with your subscribers.

Need help planning emails to send to your list? Check out the Creation Hub Private Podcast & Content Planning system.