Expert Tips on How to Avoid Emails Going to Spam

10 B2B Sales Tips on How to Avoid Emails Going to Spam

Here’s a sales fact you’ve probably already figured out for yourself: it doesn’t matter how good your product or service is, how slick your marketing messages are, or how many leads you reach out to if your marketing emails don’t land in the right place. That sucks, right? Sure, but it doesn’t have to mean ‘game over’.

You’re not alone: it’s estimated that over 15% of legitimate emails are either stopped by spam filters or ‘go missing’. That’s a lot of time and money lost by businesses all around the world every single day.

So the bad news is that email deliverability isn’t always what it should be and it can seriously impact your bottom line (remember that 15% stat? Well, that could mean a loss of around $15,000 per million emails!) But the good news is that you have the power to change that.

Here, we’ve drawn on our extensive experience conducting lead generation and sales development strategies for world-class B2B businesses to gather 10 essential tips to stop your emails going to spam, avoid spam filters, and supercharge your email deliverability. Standing out in your customers' inboxes requires creating relevant and valuable emails that not only avoid spam filters but also engage recipients and foster lasting relationships.

So stick around and discover how to get seen and boost revenue!

Introduction to Email Deliverability

Email deliverability is the backbone of successful email marketing—after all, your message can only make an impact if it actually lands in your recipient’s inbox, not the spam folder. With the sheer volume of spam emails and junk mail circulating every day, most email service providers have developed sophisticated spam filters to protect users from unwanted or potentially harmful messages. These filters analyze everything from sender reputation to email content, making it more challenging for legitimate emails to reach their intended audience.

Understanding how spam filters work is essential for anyone looking to prevent emails from going to spam. By following best practices and staying up to date with the latest email marketing trends, you can improve your email deliverability and ensure your campaigns reach the right people. In this article, we’ll break down the key factors that influence deliverability and share actionable tips to help your emails avoid the spam folder and achieve better results.

Understanding Email Spam

Email spam refers to unsolicited or irrelevant messages sent in bulk, often with the intent to advertise, scam, or spread malware. These spam emails can clutter inboxes, pose security risks, and damage trust in email communication. To combat this, modern spam filters use advanced algorithms and machine learning to analyze incoming messages for signs of spam, such as suspicious links, misleading subject lines, or the use of common spam trigger words.

However, even legitimate emails can sometimes get caught by these filters, impacting your email deliverability and sender reputation. To avoid this, it’s important to steer clear of spam trigger words in your email content and ensure your messages are relevant and valuable to your audience. Additionally, implementing email authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC helps prove your identity as a legitimate sender, further reducing the risk of your emails being marked as spam. By understanding how spam filters operate and taking proactive steps, you can keep your emails out of the spam folder and maintain strong engagement with your audience.

Building a Strong Email Foundation

A strong email foundation is essential for keeping your emails out of the spam folder and ensuring they reach your subscribers’ inboxes. Start by using a professional sender address and setting up robust email authentication protocols such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. These authentication protocols help verify your sender identity and protect your domain from being used for spam or phishing emails, which in turn boosts your sender reputation.

Implementing a double opt-in process is another best practice that can significantly improve your email deliverability. With double opt-in, subscribers confirm their interest in receiving your emails, which not only increases email engagement but also reduces the likelihood of spam complaints and helps you avoid spam traps. Partnering with a reputable email service provider and regularly monitoring your list for fake email addresses or inactive users will further enhance your inbox placement. By laying this groundwork, you’ll create a reliable system that supports your email marketing efforts and helps prevent your emails from going to spam.

Top tips to avoid the spam folder

Staying clear of the spam folder, dodging spam filters, and decreasing the chances of spam complaints all takes time. Luckily, we have a few legitimate techniques you can use to make sure your email campaigns reach recipients’ inboxes. Optimizing every aspect of your email campaign, from subject lines to content, is crucial to avoid spam filters and improve deliverability.

Let’s get started:

Tip 1: Build and maintain a clean email list

Keeping your email list clean is critical if you want to reduce the number of spam complaints you receive and boost your email engagement. What this essentially means is removing inactive or unengaged subscribers from your lead lists.

Luckily, that doesn’t have to mean going through your email lists with a fine-toothed comb; these days, there are many top-rated email hygiene tools (like MailerCheck, ZeroBounce, and EmailListVerify) that help you do this.

Using these tools, you can:

• Conduct regular list scrubbing
• Implement opt-in forms
• Use double opt-in methods (Obtaining explicit permission from subscribers through these methods is essential for maintaining a clean list and improving deliverability.)

Don’t forget: nearly 30% of email addresses become invalid every single year. So keeping on top of your email list hygiene is absolutely fundamental.

Tip 2: Use a professional email address

This may sound obvious, but using your old email addresses from 20 years ago is a bad idea when sending marketing emails.

But having a clean, trustworthy handle isn’t the only thing to consider.

Evidence shows that emails sent from free email service providers such as Gmail and Yahoo are seen as less trustworthy than those sent from a reputable domain.

So setting up a professional email using your company’s domain will really help to prevent your emails going to spam and improve your sender reputation. For any commercial email, it’s also crucial to comply with regulations like CAN-SPAM, CASL, GDPR, and CCPA by including unsubscribe links and following all legal requirements.

When trying to avoid triggering spam filters, authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are also super important (but we’ll get to that later…)

Tip 3: Craft relevant and engaging subject lines

You know the subject line is important. You've heard it a thousand times. But did you know how important subject lines are?

Well, according to some studies, almost half of recipients choose to open an email based 100% on the subject line alone. So if you're not taking your subject line seriously, you could be missing out on 50% engagement!

Of course, writing the perfect subject line is more of an art than a science. That said, there are a few key principles to remember when trying to improve your inbox placement and get those all-important clicks:

• Address a pain point
• Be clear and concise
• Try mentioning the recipient's name and/or location
• Avoid spam trigger words (like 'FREE', 'earn money,' 'buy now,' 'click here', and 'get rich quick')
• Always keep it relevant

Tip 4: Ensure high-quality content in the email body

With all email marketing, it’s essential to provide something of value in each and every email you send. Whether they’re welcome emails, transactional emails, or any other type of email that may land in a recipient’s inbox, all content must be relevant, valuable, and accessible. A well-crafted welcome email can confirm subscriptions, guide recipients on allowlisting your address, and set the tone for future engagement, which helps improve deliverability and build a positive sender-recipient relationship.

There’s a visual element to consider, too. And it’s not just for aesthetics. Sure, the correct text-to-image ratio looks more professional, but it also play a part in spam filters, too (according to some theories).

The idea is this: that spam emails often display information within images so that spam filters can’t ‘read’ the text, leading to high image-to-text ratios. To what extent this is true is up for debate, but most sources recommend a text-to-image ration of about 60/40.

Tip 5: Optimize email frequency and timing

Ah, timing. Which days are best to send emails? Is it better to send an email at 09:03am or 02:42pm? Is once a week enough? Does it even matter?

Well, it does matter. At least, email frequency matters when it comes to avoiding the junk mail. After all, how do you react when you receive 20 emails in three days from one sender? Or one every six months from a sender you don’t recognize? Straight to the junk folder.

Both over-emailing and under-emailing can be detrimental. Sending fewer emails to unengaged subscribers can help improve your sender reputation and reduce the risk of your emails being marked as spam. In general, though, it’s considered best to send emails at least once a month, but closer to once a week. Evidence shows that this is sweet spot wherein recipients are less likely to mark an email as spam email.

Tip 6: Include an easy opt-out option

Email marketing isn’t all about how to avoid the spam folder - there are laws to consider too. Laws such as the CAN-SPAM Act in the United States, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union impose strict requirements on how businesses handle email communication.

One of the stipulations is usually that sales emails include an opt-out feature and unsubscribe link.

But don’t panic: that doesn’t mean you’ll start losing all your leads. In fact, simply implementing an opt-out option can help maintain a positive sender reputation, which helps your emails avoid spam filters and therefore helps email deliverability. These practices also increase the likelihood that your future emails will reach the inbox instead of being sent to the spam folder.

Tip 7: Analyze your email campaigns

Sending emails is only half the process. All emails - including ones that failed - hold something of value for future efforts.

By monitoring and analyzing your email campaigns, specifically through metrics like open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, and spam complaints, you’ll be able to see exactly why your emails are going to spam or your sender reputation is decreasing and improve next time.

Again, modern CRM and email service providers will help you do this more efficiently. Experienced email marketers regularly analyze campaign metrics and adjust their strategies to avoid spam filters and improve deliverability. HubSpot, Salesforce, and Mailchimp are some of the biggest on the market, so be sure to check them out.

Tip 8: Warm up your IP addresses

Warming up IP addresses basically means ‘easing’ your email address into a good sender reputation by slowly increasing the number of emails you send and interacting with emails you receive. Put simply: if a new email address is pinging off one thousand emails a day, providers will likely start sending your emails to the spam folder.

To warm up your IP address and improve your domain reputation, always:

• Wait a week
• Send your first few emails manually (warming up your account by sending email manually helps build a positive reputation and avoid spam filters)
• Start with a few emails a day
• Gradually increase the number after a few weeks

Tip 9: Use email authentication techniques

SPF.), DKIM, and DMARC are all authentication protocols that allow you to protect your domain reputation and digitally sign emails. You can get details on how best to set up these authentication frameworks at the links provided, but all you need to know for now is that using them helps you stay out of spam filters and improve your email domain reputation.

It has the added bonus of reducing the risk of your domain being used for fraudulent activities, such as phishing emails, too.

Implementing these authentication protocols is a key part of a successful email program, ensuring your emails are trusted and delivered to the inbox.

Tip 10: Test your email marketing before sending

The benefits of testing your emails before sending them are twofold: firstly, it helps resolve deliverability issues, and secondly, it helps to boost engagement. So testing is a win-win.

There are a bunch of great tools you can use to test your emails. Some of the most popular include:

• Litmus
• Email on Acid
• Mailtrap
• MailTester
• SpamAssassin

Using a spam checking tool can help you evaluate the likelihood of your emails being marked as spam, allowing you to identify and fix issues that could affect your inbox placement.

In general, these tools will help you identify formatting errors, broken links, spam trigger words, and other deliverability issues so that when the time comes to bit the bullet, you’re 100% optimized.

Eliminate spam complaints and avoid spam filters with optimized email marketing

Email - the most popular outreach method for sales organizations the world over - is a fast and cheap tool for B2B sales. But optimizing your sales emails to stay out of the spam filter and sidestep spam filters can be a challenging task.

There are many factors to consider, covering everything from the subject line and body content (i.e., the copy itself) to the technical aspects involved in enhancing your sender reputation and cleaning up your lists. We’ve taken you through some of the top tips for improving email deliverability here, but the journey is never over.

To further optimize email delivery, it's important to understand how different email clients and email filters impact whether your message lands in the recipient's inbox or gets flagged as junk email. Be aware of heuristic filters that analyze your email content for spam-like characteristics, and avoid sending spam by following compliance and technical guidelines to prevent trigger spam filters. You can also use inbox rules and adjust Outlook settings to ensure legitimate emails are not marked as junk email. Focusing on these best practices will help your emails consistently reach the recipient's inbox.

So if you want to learn more exclusive tips on how to skip spam filters and stay out of the spam folder, connect with Leadium today. Our blog is a great place to get expert insight on all things lead generation and sales development. And if you have any questions regarding our decade of experience boosting revenue for world-class B2B businesses, don’t hesitate to reach out!

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