13 Reasons Why Your Emails May Be Going to Spam

1. Intro: Do You Have A Spam Problem?: do your email. Open rates seem to be getting lower and lower. Are you wondering why you're not hitting the optimal open rate of at least 15%? Are you open rates in the 10% range, or even worse, lower than that? 6% 7%? You may, in fact, have a SPAN problem. Believe it or not, email inbox service providers such as Gmail, Yahoo or a well decide whether your emails are fit to go in the in boxes of recipients or whether they should go into the spam folder. Basically, as email marketers were all being scored on what's considered a report card, it's our senator reputation rate. Your center reputation is something that you should be mindful of as a demo marketer to make sure that you're in good standing in the world of email marketing. While we can't control the way the inbox service providers decide to rank us, we can control the things that we do to help keep us in good standing in this class, I will take you through 13 reasons why your emails might be going to the spam box. I'll be providing you with tips on how to keep your emails out of the spam trap and make sure they're hitting the recipients that you're sending to. If you're a marketer or company that cares about your senator reputation, score and you want to stay in good standing in the world of email marketing and with your eyes peas, then this is the class for you. This is an easy to follow class, with quick pointers on what you should do or what you should look out for. For your class project. I acts that you share a few specific goals on what you want to achieve in terms of email engagement this quarter, I'll actually to share your ideal open rate, your ideal Click the rate and I want you also to give us a sample of your next upcoming email, the subject line that you will use and if you want, you can also include a screenshot of the email. This will help you to get feedback from myself as well as the peers in your community. With this class, I look forward to seeing what you share with us, and I also look forward to helping you become a better email marketing 2. Spam Test Tools: Now, before we get into the lesson, I want to talk about a couple of tools that are out there to help you check to see what your spam scores and delivery deliver ability scores look like. Now there are a lot of tools out there. Some are free, but most of them are paid APS, but they are good applications that you would want to use. If you really discover that you have a major spam problem, I would recommend if you are running into really low deliver ability rates. So let's say your open rates are in the 5% 7%. I would go ahead and definitely use one of the tools to check and see if my emails are going to spam, because that's gonna be critical. What I'm gonna teach you in this lesson is more so preventative tactics and things that you can do to be careful and be preventive about falling into that spam trap. But again, if you do have a major problem that you may wanna sign up for, or use one of the absolute available so one of them that's a really good at. I believe you get one free usage. One free tests before you have to go to the paid model, which is Glock APS, and it's a Glock APS www dot clock apse dot com, and it's really simple to use. All you do is you indicate where you're sending your emails, too. So whether their Gmail inboxes a well, you know. So, depending on what the majority of your subscribers subscribe from, and then it will give you what's called a seamless. Now, a seedless is just basically a a set of test emails that you would send your email out to. And then it's going to give you a little snippet, a little line of text that it wants you to put in your actual body of your email. And then you would send that email out to this seedless. It's about 70 or so emails that you would send it to, and then what happens? It goes to retest it. It takes a few minutes to just run through the test, and then it will come back and give you results of where your out of all the inbox providers out there Gmail, yahoo, etcetera. It will tell you where your email placements are strong and where they're not. So it will tell you if, uh, you know, let's say you send it out. Ban. It hit 97% of in boxes. That's actually a good rate. I'll go through some of the deliberate deliver ability stats in a second, but, um, yeah, so if it hits 97% of in boxes, you're OK if it comes back and says that, um, let's say 20% or a certain amount of percentage of e mails actually went to spam, then you'll know that you have a problem. There's something you need to fix. So Block caps is really good at that. It will tell you your placement rates across all of the inbox service providers that you indicate you sent to you send to and, um, and again, you'll get your results. So if you have ah, large list on def your maybe doing partnership kind of list things like that, then that could be something. This could be something that you may want to invest in. Just to be sure that you're not, um, you're not sending Teoh e mail addresses that are not, um, that are that are not valid or that are going to span another tool that you can use his mail tester. So now, male tester, it's free, Um, and it's a very basic level test. It really gets through the same kind of concept. You send an email out to the email that they give that they provide for you, and then I'll come back and give you your score, and that's basically it. Scorning everything's from the validity of how your email is perceived in the world of inbox service providers down to. If you need Teoh, do some any kind of configurations What, your domain or anything like that. So it's a very simple test. I mean this, at the very least, something I'd recommend you guys do just, you know, one. Definitely for practices, the seaway returns and first person knowledge. But, you know, it's a nice little test that you can do. Let's say after you even take this course just to see where you stand. And then, for those of you wore really into serious testing, your maybe part of enterprise or a bigger company. There are larger firms out there that that's strictly what they do, amongst other things, so let Mrs Well known amongst the world of email deliver ability and sending, and that might be something that you will you want to look into. And they have reps, and they have teams that can assist you along the way and become your point person so you don't have to go at it alone. So there's lots of options out there. Just make sure you're looking into what's best for you. What is your actual need right now? And then you'll be fine from there. Next up, I'll take you through some email, deliver ability, steps that you should know about. 3. Deliverability Stats: So let's talk a little bit about delivery ability. Deliver ability is the rate at which your e mails are hitting your subscribers in boxes. Now we need to be careful when we start growing our email lists and start sending out to, ah, large email lists fairly often because what happens is the in box service provider. So the G e mails the yahoos in the hot meals of the world. They start to look at the engagement of your overall subscribers. And if you have a lot of subscribers marking Yuhas s ban, or if you have a lot of subscribers who are not even opening your emails, the in box of spiders will start to count that negatively against what will call your senator reputation score. So we need to make sure that we have good deliver ability practices in place and that we're maintaining ah, high enough score now. The reality is, is that email open rates are pretty low relative to other engagement rates of any other marketing tactic. So right now we're looking at about an industry average of 15 to 20% open rates. Now that is used to be lower, but it's getting better because we're all getting better. As email marketers segmenting practices are becoming better. And also list purging techniques are actually becoming more popular. So, you know, we should be at a point where we're no longer accepting 10% open rates and we want a monitor for that. So let's go over a few deliver ability stats. So you know exactly where we at where we sit out in the world of email marketing and what you should be looking out for. So one thing to know is that one thing that actually can get your emails actually going to spam a little bit more often are images. And you should know that your subscribers, actually 40% of them may not actually be seeing the images in your email. And that's because the I. S. P s inbox service providers actually usually don't load the image automatically. The user has to actually accept the images from you. So let's say Gmail or even a well, they lacked the recipient do you want, except images from this sender, and they have to actively click yes, but in in order to get image either one time or they can click. Yes, they want to receive it, you know, for every email that this center sends, so they're pretty low. That's why we do want to make sure we're putting proper all tags in are images and also just leading with text wherever we can. That saying that you have to have a long winded text email, but you wanna have, ah, pretty fair balance ratio of image to tax. So my rule of thumb is usually want to images Max in an email and then just a brief amount of text to get your point across. Another stat to know is that, um, open rates are not the only thing that you should be optimizing for and continuously always using as your your major benchmark. Um, engagement rate. It's a vanity metric, really, if you think about it. So if all we do is look at open rates and act against that, we're forgetting about the other things that are really important. So are our subscribers, even reading the emails and spending time with the Eagles. Are they taking action on those emails? So click through rates, engagement rates, conversion rates and other factors that go into the full compass of email are really what should be important. And if we get those things right, we won't even have to even worry about our open rates. Good, Because those will just be good as a natural default of people want to receive your emails . Um, the other stat you shouldn't know just is this The general sat across the board is deliver ability, um, placement rates. So the U. S actually has a lower placement inbox placement rate versus the US versus the global rate , so the US placement rate is 73%. So if your U. S senator just know and you're us understanding to us recipients know that your place Marine probably will be a little bit lower on average, just because just the nature of where email is at, um in the States. And so that's really why the Global Inbox place Marie its 79%. So, as you can see, just a tad bit higher. Eso If you are using something like Glock APs to test, what's your placement rate inbox placement rate you can use? This is a benchmark, the 73 if you're us or the 79. If you're outside of the US up there are others. So if you need one specific me for Canada, one specifically for Europe. Um, you can get those, um, and return path is usually a good one. You can go ahead and do a search for a return path inbox placement rate, and they have, ah, study. That's out. That's pretty good. All right, in the last step, here is really just about the eyes, peas and what they're doing. So the inbox service providers you should know that they are cracking down very hard on getting spam out of recipients in boxes. So they are taking measures to make sure that recipients are receiving the emails that they want to receive. So there's a lot more algorithm coming into play. AI is actually becoming a big factor with an email and emails are getting smarter. Email inbox service providers are getting smarter about whether they should actually even deliver une email to the recipient's inbox or not based on their past behavior. So something that I suspect happening in the future is, let's say, Gmail. If they noticed that you haven't opened the last 20 emails from from north etched from they may automatically decide to unsubscribe you automatically from Nordstrom emails. Or maybe there will be a pop up saying, Do you want to unsubscribe and just kind of without the user even having to take action to unsubscribe, they will automatically suppress an unsubscribe, that person from getting your email. So just be cognisant of that that inbox service providers are getting smarter. 4. What is Spam?: So what this span really mean? Let's go over a few facts about span, So one in the U. S. So if you are a U. S. Email marketer, spam has its own federal law. So what we have in the U. S. Is called this cans bam law, and that's a federal legislation. It was enacted in 2003. So right now, nothing has really been updated on the actual ah regulation of it all. But there are different rules and regulations and amendments that have been that you should just know about it. Make sure you keep up to date about. Also, different states have their own, um, legal legalities and laws. California, for instance, is a privacy heavy state. So there's some new things that I think are coming into play for some that may already be in play that you should particularly pay attention to, especially as it comes to privacy and your email. But, um, besides actual law itself, one thing that we should know is that spam really is whatever the recipient perceives it to be. So while spam from its legal definition was created to avoid the really malicious senders of people who were scraping email address addresses and emailing people unsolicited and emailing inappropriate content. That's why it was created, however, to a regular recipient. Let's say who forgot? They signed up for your email lists and received five emails from you and became really upset that they received those five emails because again, they couldn't remember when, when and where they signed up for your list. So they go ahead and mark your email s bam. And it's a little button that they confined in any of their email providers. That tells the Gmail or the oil well or Yahoo Ice P that they don't want to receive this email. So instead of deleting the email or just simply un subscribing the email, they actually mark us bam. So, um, again, and that was a perception just based on they didn't want to receive your emails anymore. And even though your emails were appropriate and they did opt into your list, it was a matter of the timing of the day that that person perceived us pan and then marked us bam. So I think that's more important to think about then, even what the actual law says because it is what the recipient perceives it to be. And the other thing about spam that you want to know is that, um, your email has to be of some kind of commercial advertisements. So if you're obviously just checking in with some friends saying, How are you want to keep in touch? Want to grab coffee? Technically, that is not really what falls in the span bucket. But if you are trying to sell something commercially, then you do fall under the spam compliance regulations and then in terms of the actual regulation and what, um, three criteria must be met before even actually gets considered to be span One is Anonima di, meaning that you are not disclosing who you are, what company you are. And what's the actual location headquarters off where your company resides? Um, it's a mass email. So again, it's not. We're not talking about email that's sent out. A one person were talking about email that was sent in bulk and batch to, um, mass group of people and then third, it's unsolicited. So the person did not request to receive this thing that they did not opt in. Um so all that being said one thing I think we should really all note is that again. Um, this law for the U. S. Was enacted in 2003 but there are so many different updates that are coming along. If you are part of the EU, the European Union, then you guys have GDP are that's current right now. And that has its own set of rules and regulations that are even stricter if you're also part of Canada, which has Castle as one of their laws, and then that's another set of its own. So just always pay attention to the particular laws regarding the country and the city, perhaps the state where you conduct business in and where not only where you conduct business, but where you also send your emails out to so where your recipients actually reside. That's all important that you want to make sure you're complying with those laws and definitely seek out legal advice from your legal team. There are lots of privacy lawyers out there who can help in that regard, but just understand what it is before you do start emailing and recognizing that you're doing the right kinds of practices. So we know that span is a problem. It exists today, and there are people who intentionally set batsman and there are those who really don't do it intentionally. They they're doing what they do to survive. We all are susceptible to be considered spammers. If we just fall into the hands of the wrong person who is not having a good day that day, perhaps. But what we should know is that 26% of email campaigns are actually incorrectly flagged a spam. And when I say incorrectly going back to the definitions, I just gave you your being marked as a spammer when you really were following all the rules . It just happens to be that person who received. It's not a good day for them. They maybe maybe received too many emails in one sitting, and that really is the problem. So we have to take batting to consideration that many consumers and recipients are not quite sure what is actually the technical definition of span in order to get flagged as a potential spammer in the eyes of the ice p. It does take a few complaints and not even just I S P So also your email service provider. So let's say you're using the mail chimp If they notice that a certain percentage of your your subscribers are marking us spam, that actually negatively reflects you and they could actually disable your account. And you won't have the capability to email anyone through their platform anymore and that that bad reputation might follow you. So let's say you're on male chimp and you get flagged as a spam account because many of your sort of average we're marking us, bam! And then you try to go over to active campaign or Clay Vo, for instance. Ah, they may see that record and they may not allow you to use their services. So we want to make sure we're in the right habit of creating good reputation and following the practices as best as we could. And just know that your eyes peas are getting smarter. They are offering, um, unsubscribed automatic. Um, subscribes to people who have an email open their email in a month that that feature, I would say it's something that will be coming soon. It's kind of going out in beta now. I've seen it a couple of times, but I do think in the future these were the things that are gonna happen automatically, which I will say to the benefit of us all. Beware of Ah, Spam, what it is and how it's perceived. What your recipients and you should be in good standing. So now this is gonna bring us into our next a couple of lessons here that will give you the 13 reasons why your emails might be going into spam and what you can do to avoid that or to help improve your reputation, right? 5. Reason #1: Subscribers: All right, let's get into the 13 reasons why your emails might be going to spam. So reason number one, it actually might be your subscribers who are sending you the rest of your emails to spam. So when I say that, what I mean is that your subscribers are possibly actively marking your emails as spam, and it may not be all your subscribers. Let's say you have a list of 10,000 and a few people had a bad day or just didn't want your email certain days and actively clicked the mark s bam button in their email provider. So their Gmail account er there Yahoo account or a O. L account then that tells Gmail, Yahoo or AOL well, that many people don't want to receive your email. So it has to be at a certain percentage in order for it to really count as a flag. And the I S P is Look at that. And if they see a large activity of people marking your emails a spam, they will start to send the rest of your subscribers over the rest of your emails over to spam, and they won't even hit the rest of those subscribers in boxes because a certain percentage of people already said they don't want to receive your emails. So if, ah high enough number of people mark us spam, you will be considered a spammer and that count storage eyes, peas. But it also counts toward your E S P s your email service provider. So the male chimps of the world, if they see a large activity off people marking us spam, as I said before, what's gonna happen is they are going to deem you, ah, person that they don't want on their platform and you may get banned. So you want to make sure that you're keeping your span complaint rate below 2%. They are some providers that actually give you that calculation automatically. I knew Clay Vo does, and there are a few others that do. And if you don't see that on the metrics dashboard of the SPR using, then I would recommend contacting the support team to find out that number. If you believe there's a problem, trust me. If it gets to a number that's unacceptable, you will get flagged. So again, you want to make sure you're keeping out at a rate that is below 0.2%. A tip for you is if that number consistently remains high. The people marking us spam. That probably means that you're sending irrelevant emails or you've captured your list in some way where people really didn't want to be opted in. Or maybe you bought a list. And if you did that, I would suggest not continuing with that because clearly that's not a good list that you bought, so there could be a number of reasons. But if you have that, that that is an area that you will need to fix, the other thing that you can do about this is placing your unsubscribe link a little higher and not way at the bottom of your email. So making it very visible and not hard forward The subscriber to Dio. If subscriber doesn't buying your unsubscribe link or doesn't know how to unsubscribe right away, they will just quickly hit the market spam, so make sure you look into your subscribers 6. Reason #2: Subject Line: reason Number two. Why your emails might be going to spam might actually have to do with your subject line. When it comes to sending emails, we want to make sure we have the most enticing, the most captivating subject lines that will make our readers want to answer. You should absolutely do a B testing what your subject lines to see. Which ones work. But what you should know is that there are actually what's called ma'am trigger words, and there's a whole list of them. You can actually do a Google search for spam trigger words, and you'll see common words that automatically get your email sent to the spam box and some of those terms I have here. So 100% free, any kind of terms having to deal with financial freedom. So get rich quick schemes anything like that that will flag the spam filter as well. And also something you want to make sure you don't have is all caps in your emails. So every capitalizing every first letter of each word is totally fine. But you don't want all caps in every word that will. That will trigger spam. Make sure your subject lines reflect with actual body. The content of the email is about so that's really important, really, from the user's perspective, in the user's point of view, when they actually open your email, be careful of too much punctuation. So one exclamation point is enough. To be honest. Actually, studies have found that not even having an expiration point is usually more helpful and beneficial to your email than even having one. So leave it out if you really don't need it. Definitely don't have three or four or five. And also having R E and the colon as if you're responding to an email. And it's a false response, right? So the inbox service provider knows that there was a threat to this email. And if you have Ari and Colon and there's really no true thread that will trigger some morning, and also it serves as a false perception to your reader, you don't want to mislead the reader. Your subject line is really critical when it comes to having a good center reputation 7. Reason #3: Links : the third reason why your emails might be going to spam might have to do with the links that you're putting in your email. Now. Most email providers provide you with special see TA buttons. Call to action buttons that you can use within your email that hide any long and unpretty links, so you shouldn't have to be using links such as bit lee links or any kind of shorter links that are out there. But maybe there's a reason why you're using them. Or perhaps you accidentally put them in there or you just don't know. But there's no reason to use bit Lee links. And the reason why is that your I S P will detect that you have a link that's masked or shortened, and it will consider it will think that you are masking some kind of spammy euro continent trying to get behind any of the spam traps or spam detectors that are out there. So don't use short ners in your email. Use the long links that you have. You know they're ugly. If they're long, doesn't matter, put them mass them or hide them inside a call to action. But that's provided by your email service provider. If you are not using email service provider or for some reason you can't use the button, then use the hyperlink future. All you have to do is select the word that you want the link to to be attached to and hyperlink it. 8. Reason #4: Deletes: reason number four. Why your emails might be going to spam are deletes. And what I mean by this is that your subscribers are deleting your emails without even opening them. So it hits their inbox. They'd maybe see the subject line, and they decide they don't want to read it or they've just seen your emails too many times and they just automatically delete they don't even open the email. So I species such as Gmail are starting to crack on on that, and basically it's called the under unengaged subscriber. So if it notices that your emails, air hitting inboxes and a majority of your users on large percentage of times are automatically just clicking, delete without even opening it, that's gonna count against you. And the more artificial intelligence gets into emails and Gmail starts working with artificially intelligent tools. If this is gonna become more and more of a problem for you as an email marketer, however, I like to say that all problems create good engagements for your users. So the fact that Gmail is doing this, it's basically trying to make everything most effect fel for both sides. You as the marketer and then and user as the recipient. And it also creates ah incentive for the user to actually either unsubscribe if it knows that Gina is going to start sending any unopened emails over to spam automatically, or it incentivizes the user to actually open your email to see what it is about. Because if not, Gmail is going to start making those decisions on behalf of the user. And some users don't like that bait they want. They want to have control over it. So it's putting the user in more of an active environment with their emails, as opposed to a passive environment. Pay attention to people who are not opening your emails, use catchy subject lines, engaging subject lines and also shoot an email onto your readers every now and then that are just plain text emails that let them know, um, the importance of opening every email and why they should open the email, give, give, benefit, give value within each and every email, so they know that there's something looking there's something they should look forward to with every open 9. Reason #5: Unexpected Emails: So if you've heard that adding people to your email lists from your contact list or from your business cards is a good idea, you may want to rethink that. The reality is, most people who are in your contacts do not want to be in your email subscriber list. You want to make sure that you're getting permission. Reason number five while your emails might be going to spam is because your emails are unexpected when they are hitting the recipient's inbox. You should not be sending your emails out to a list of people who have not actively opted into your list and when I say actively opted in, they either filled out a form giving you their email address explicitly checking off that they want to receive your emails. Or they've ah attended one of your events and actively checked that they wanted to receive your emails. Or they've bought one of your items before and again actively checked that They want to receive your email so active opt ins are what's key here. And I know many times, even with my clients, I get well, I have a list of people who are in my contact they include my customers, my contact people, I've met it, networking events or people who have bought for me before on my e commerce or whatever it is. You need to be careful. You don't just wanna automatically subscribe those people to your list. Sure, they may want to be a part of your list, and I'm not saying to not just add them. What I'm actually saying is that if you're gonna add these people onto your list and there's a valid reason for doing so, what you should do first is get their permission. So don't just add everyone from your contact list onto your you know subscriber list of Let's say you have 1000 people on your contact list. Don't just add those 1000 people send out an email directly from you personally. And yes, it might sound a little manual, but you can use tools for that to make it a little less manual. But as long as it's coming from you from your direct email account and not your email service provider, and it's a soft intro to soft reintroduction, a preview, whatever it is and a little one line or two line email that says, Hey, uh, it's been allowed since we spoke or whatever. You know, whatever intro you want. Great seeing you at event last week, I wanted to ask you if you wanted to be a part of my email newsletter list because of X, Y and Z reason. Or maybe you're giving something out in order to give that something out, they need to provide you with your email so you can say, Hey, I have this course on 10 ways to do effective networking in in meetings. Do you want to receive this? If so, let me know when I added to that list and you can get a daily email for me. Whatever it is, just asked the person if they want to be a part of that list, give them a reason why they should be a part of that list, because nowadays most people don't just want to be a part of your list for no reason at all , and then add them onto your list. So again, get that permission first and make sure they want to be on your list, because again, just because you met someone at a networking of it just because someone is a close family friend, Just because someone is a customer does not mean that they want to receive emails from you . So make sure emails are expected and relevant to the reason why they signed up. And this will reduce your chances of the person actively working us ban. Because again, remember, we do not want them toe Marcus a spam. 10. Reason #6: Reminding: reason number six for white females might be going to spam is one that we rarely ever think about. And it's the simple act of reminding your subscribers why they're even on your list. So someone may have subscribed fearless six months ago, a year ago, even three months ago, and they would have forgotten why they're on that list. So you want to every few emails, maybe once a month, once 1/4 however you want a time it send a little reminder. Maybe put a little blurb at the end of your email, reminding that person why they're on that list. So you're on this list because you attended. My artists reveal events in downtown L. A. Remind them given give them that gentle nudge of why they signed up in the first place and that just give them the respect of saying, Oh, yes, I remember why I want to be a part of this. This and they will. There's a higher chance of that person staying on your list and again not subscribing and not mark you as a spammer. Um, so we wanna do this just basically what I call it, it's a check for re engagement and putting it out there and giving them the opportunity to see. You know, this was six months six months ago that you sign up for this list. Do you want to stay on this list? Do that every so often and you should be fine. People who say they don't want to be on the list. Lytham automatically unsubscribe or figure out a purge sequence. And when I say perch sequence, what I mean is, ah unengaged subscriber sequence where you start turning up the people who are uninterested and un engaged with your emails. 11. Reason #7: Engagement: reason Number seven is engagement, and it's actually reinforcing. What we've spoke about in the previous lessons and engagement is important. So, like I said, if people are automatically deleting your email, that's a negative impact on your center reputation. Score also, if people are not engaging with your email on not clicking on an email or just simply not. Opening your emails than what you want to do is monitor that behavior and set up active sequence and active email flow that gets those UN engaged subscribers unsubscribed from your list and an unengaged subscriber flow. Basically, it's segments. It looks for segments of people who haven't opened. Let's say the last 10 emails and it will. You want to get those people in a segment, and what you want to do is put them through a stream of two or three emails that asked them , Hey, do you want to stay on this list? If you do click here if you don't please unsubscribe here. If you do nothing, I will be un subscribing you in the next seven days. That's all the email has to say. Many of your email service providers have some kind of sequence template sequence that you can use with this. I believe mail Chimp has one. Clay vo has one active campaign may have one. You just have to look around. There's definitely different block post out there that show you a really good UN engagement sequence I'll share when we with us. Well, in this link below and you can figure out how to put one together that works for your users and actively gets your subscribers your unengaged subscribers out of your list. So just note that you should not be continuously sending emails to people who are not opening your emails negatively reflect flex you, and why pay for the subscribers who again are not taken action on your emails? 12. Reason #8: You're Making It Difficult: reason Number eight. Why your emails might be hitting spam is actually that your unsubscribe link is very hard to find where it doesn't work or it's too many steps for the user or it's too many steps for the user to unsubscribe. You want to make sure that you're providing easy and efficient and simple method for users to unsubscribe. If you're Linkous hidden, if there's no direct link, they have to fill out a form. It's going to upset your reader, and you don't want to give them that experience. And guess what. They will hit that report spam box. So make sure that you haven't easy unsubscribe link and that you're honoring that subscription immediately. I know the regulations say that you have to honor it within 10 days. Guess what that regulation was made in 2003 so there weren't any automation features or technology back then. Now there is. There's no excuse why you, as a marketer, should take 10 days to remove the person from your email list. And if there are reasons why, so be it. But as at least make sure you're honoring those on engaged, um, requests, um, the more the more immediate you can do it, the better it looks on you, the better it is for your reputation. 13. Reason #9: Complaint Rate: So I spoke about the complaint. The spam complaint rate already. Now, if you are using an email service provider that provides you with those metrics, you're in luck because you're able to monitor that on a campaign by campaign basis. So it's a little bit more direct for you. If you're using an email service provider, that doesn't give you those metrics off the back. Then you may want to email your support team to find out what that number is. And if it's high because you do want to monitor that and and take care of that before it's before you, it's too late. Um, basically, you should just be looking at for a spam complaint rate that is no higher than 0.2%. And trust me, that may seem like Whoa, I might get to that number really quick. If you have a large list, it may take a few a fairly good amount of people to get to that number, but it's it's It's something you just want to look out for. So be cognisant of what your spam completely is. You don't want to be higher than 0.2%. Look at your metrics in your dashboard to see if that's a metric that's offered. And again, if it's not, reach out to your service provider support team to see if they can give you that number. Trust me, they all have that number because they are monitoring us well. And if you have a high spam complaint rate, they will actually deactivate you from your from their their system. You won't be able to use their tools that anymore. And that record will probably follow you. And you won't be able to use other email marketing tools anymore. And like I said, for sure, the I S P is like Gmail and Yahoo. We're looking at that as well and automatically, If people are marking us, bam, they are gonna automatically send other subscribers emails over this ban as well. So monitor that rate as often as you can 14. Reason #10: Technical Configurations: reason Number 10 is a bit more of a technical approach. So if you are just beginning in your email marketing Siri's and you've never had an email account, then you're in luck because you can address these things straight on before you even set up your inbox and before you even start emailing people. If you've already set up your email in boxing, have you already started marketing via email, then this is something you're just gonna have to go back and do. It's never too late to do it, but it is something you want to get, right, So we're gonna talk for a few seconds about I, P S P, F D K I am and Demark. So just for definitions purposes What? These are these air technical items that you'll want to set up when you're setting up your your MX records. So your email record within your domain and wherever you created your email address. So if you're not a technical person than I will share a few links, that just kind of explain this in a little little bit more detail. But you may also just want to work with your developer, your Web Master, if you have an email consultant who can go ahead and just get these things set up for you usually your email, your email. What? I'm sorry, Your Web master. Usually your Web master can go ahead and crew and fix this for you. But I p is your So it's It's your critical address and you want to do a check, Make sure not blacklisted. So you going back to the earlier lesson where it lists the spam check tool, so annex. Ah, so the male tester tool That is a tool that you can use to check your i p and see if your I P has been blacklisted and ready rare for this to happen. But it has happened. If you've had a history of sending e mails that have gone to spam or have that have been spammy off, your website has been spammy. So check your I P address. Use the mail tester tool to do that. SPF is your sender policy framework. So again, all of these could be tested using male tester dot com and your center policy framework. It identifies, which I p use are allowed to send emails using your domain. So you basically put in you fill up this information. It's very quick to do when you go to your settings. And so, let's say for using G suite, you can go ahead and set this up within your G suite account and wherever your domain has been purchased. So make sure you have your SPF records set and then DK I am domain keys identified. Mail. This basically defends against anyone intercepting your email, and you put one content in your email and then spammers. What they used to do is come in and change the content of their email. So we it protects you against that. So it's making sure what you send is what the recipient is actually getting. So if you set up your d K. I am, this assures you and protects against that and Demark domain based message identification, authentication, reporting and common compliments. So this tells the inbox what they should do. Ah, with the emails that are not passing SPF or not passing DK I am, and should it allow it to the filtered should have rejected. So these are things just to look out for again. This is more of a technical item to look out for. If you're if you use a tool, such a smell tester, it'll give you those. We'll tell you what needs to be fixed or input automatically, and I'll share with you a few links that can help, depending on what domain or hosting service you're using and where you can get these change changes made. If you're using a Web master, you can simply asked them these four questions. Um, can you check my eye? PH can check my SPF DK I am, and they should probably be able to do that could test for you as well. 15. Reason #11: Who Are You Again?: recent Number 11 is well, actually one of my favorites. So Ah, proper welcome sequence is something that you're gonna want to set up when your subscribers first received your first sign up for your email. So if you do not have a welcome sequence, welcome being new subscribers onto your list. This can increase your chances of going to spam later on. And here's the logic. So someone comes to your website, they sign up for your email and let's say you're used. You send out monthly block post so they sign up on the second of the month. You already sent out the first email on the first of the month, so they missed that email of the month. Now they have to wait 29 days to receive your next email, and on the first of the next month, they actually received that email of your next block post. And they've now forgotten why they signed up for your lest they forgot who you are. And they're confused as to why they're getting this email in the first place. They're gonna hit the spam, but most likely because they're just like, Why am I getting this email or they'll hit and subscribe, or they'll just automatically delete. These are all things that your eyes, peas and your ESPN are looking out for. So you want to get ahead of that and avoid that happening. And the way you can do that is by setting up a welcome intro sequence that goes out to your subscribers immediately once they sign up for your list. So whether you're next scheduled email is a week from now or a month from now. Doesn't matter. They're first going to receive your welcome sequence and that welcome sequence. There's a lot of different tips on how to form a proper welcome sequence they should be about. You know, they could be anywhere from 3 to 7 e mails, and the very first email is walking him them and thanking them for subscribing your list. It's letting them know how often you send out emails and letting them know what to expect, what type of content they will receive from you, and it also lets them know how they can unsubscribe if they ever want to get Stop receiving emails from you ever again. So it's a great way to get people on your list. It's a great way to give them the courtesy and respect and knowing that they have the freedom of choosing what's important to them in terms of what they receive in their in box . And it's just it's great branding for you. You can. If you install a welcome sequence, you'll see that your metrics actually are higher. So 40% open rates usually are typical for welcome sequences, and they can actually help also in getting you your first sale. So if you're any commerce store, you may wanna offer 15% discount. That comes attached to a three part welcome sequence that gets that person to buy once they sign up for that list. So look for ways to create a good welcome sequence, and that will really help you avoid the spam trap. 16. Reason #12: Unengaged: Now let's talk a little bit about engagement and creating more compelling and engaging content. So a big part of the reasons why people might be marking us, bam or just stop reading your emails altogether and deleting them is that your first few emails to them were del. They were un engaging. They didn't really understand the point of them. They didn't know what they were supposed to do. And after about three emails, they decided to stop opening your emails. Not me is also another reason for an engagement. So if you are consistently sending on engaging emails, fix it. Get a writer, a copywriter. Find a designer. If you're going to have compelling images in there, make them more compelling higher and email consultants to find out what you could do better about your emails. You just want to make sure you're providing valuable content that makes the reader want to know more. So be educational, educational emails and work a ton. No matter whether you're an e commerce store. B two b business entertaining emails use entertaining visuals If you can have humorous subject lines. BBB helpful, humorous and entertaining. Figure out ways to just make your emails more valuable than that more valuable for your users. Also, look for ways to use segmentation. You probably shouldn't be sending out the same content. All your users figure out who your users are and what they're interested in, and send them content that is relevant to them. Just because your segment of women are interested in the Scully's for the winter does not mean your segment of men will be interested in Scully's. Maybe they're interested in the hoodies. I don't know. Depending on what your your content is, you may want to look into segmenting as well. So be engaging. What? Your emails. Higher copywriter If you can, um, or just just look up some basic copyrighting tips and and and content tips for engagement. 17. Reason #13: Domain Warming: the 13th and final reason why your emails might be going to spam may have to do with domain warming. So let me explain what domain warming is. A. It's a it's a it's Ah, it's a strategy that you would do to warm up your lists when you're first on boarding on to a new E S P. So whether you're a new email marketer in the world of email marketing or whether you've you're just migrating, you used to be on male chimp. Now, your mind reading to Cleave Leo, you should first warm up your domain and the reason why that ISS So I'll tell you what domain warming is first. So domain warming is Let's say you have a list of 10,000 people and you're a first time marketing never sent out emails to your audience ever. And you sign up for an E S. P and email service provider and you send your first email blouse. What will happen is the I S P ease. The Gino's of the world will basically look at you as a senator and say I have no record and no history. Have no report card on this on this company as a sender. So I don't know if they're spammers or not. And what they're going to do is just automatically not give you the benefit of the doubt. They're going to possibly send a lot of your emails to span because they don't know who you are. However, what we should do is with domain warming, we should identify our most engaged subscribers. So this really works, too, If you have sent out a couple of emails in the past. And let's say you have a group of 10% of your subscribers who are most engaged. You want to take that 10% of people and you want to start off with just them and send out an email to them on Lee because they are the most engaged people on. What you're doing is you're showing the I S. P s saying, Look, I sent this email out and I had a 50% open rate. I'm well trusted in in the space. They will see that. Then you go on to 24 hours later and then you take the next group of people. So the group of 100. So for she started with a batch to 20. Then you go to the batch of 100 then you send out an email to that group of people. And what's happening is the ice P saw that your last email had a really good engagement rate. So the next email that you're sending 200 people, they're gonna release it out two more of those people, rather than extending it straight to spam. Then, 24 hours later, you take another group of 500 people, hopefully again, who are more engaged in, then then the rest of the people on the list, and you send a batch out to that. So all domain warming is it's sending out your emails in small batches to your most engaged subscribers. And if you don't have a list of engage subscribers, will let yet, because you are a new email marketer. That's fine. What you're just doing is sending it out in small batches, so you're not doing this massive list that's more likely to get you flagged as a spammer. First time spammer. So batch test as much as you can use domain warming as a practice, especially when you're migrating from one email service provider toe another. The other thing that you should know is that email service providers also come with their center reputation scores. So if you are on an email service provider that had a history off accepting spammers as clients onto their account and they let all of those clients send out all of these emails and the majority of those emails were marked a span that E S P gets a negative sending score. And if you were once on that platform, you decided, Hey, I want to move forward to a better platform. Uh, that score carries with you, so you're bound by your own score, but also bound by the score that you might have picked up from your previous email service provider. So be careful of that. Don't Domain. Warming is a very good practice to utilize when you can 18. Final Summary: Now that you've gotten the 13 reasons why your emails might be going to spam, let's just take a moment to sum it up with some final thoughts here. So we already know that we want to have a good reputation in the world of, you know, marketing. And we don't want to continuously do bad practices that get us into spam or that Dimas as a malicious email marketer. So when you are looking for ways, follow these 13 tips. Check off the ones that you think are the areas that you have problems in and get them fixed a soon as you can and start with the low hanging fruit. What can you fix right away? You know, if it just has to do it, making sure you have your SPF records and D. Carey I'm set up tackle that first. If it just has to do with Well, I don't have a welcome sequence going on at all. Get that in. It shouldn't take you long to do any of these single items that are listed in the list of 13. Just make sure you are paying attention to the metrics that matter, so you definitely want to pay attention to your open rates. Do not ignore that. They did say it was a vanity metric, but it is a metric that you should be looking at when you're first looking out as you get into doing more email marketing. Remember that you should expand from just looking at the open race. Look at your click rates. Look at your overall engagement rates. Definitely find out what your spam A rates are from time to time. Look at your bounce rates as well. And if you're e commerce store, there's more likely a chance that you have a massive list. Pay attention to what you're users air doing. Not everyone wants to be on your list. Purge them as you need to. So that way you don't continue emailing theon engaged subscribers. I also want to warn them, not saying Don't do it. I'm just saying, Be careful when you buy list. Um, if you're buying from an unrepeatable third party, that it can affect you in the list that you have in the list that you're sending to. So be wary. Be very careful. One buying lists on. Like I said, I said I repeated to hear, Do not buy list. I'm going to just say it. I'm not saying not to buy it, but I'm saying be very, very careful. Hinted. Don't buy. Um, if you do realize that you have a spam problem and you tried all of these 13 tactics on your own, then it may be viable that you wanna utilize 1/3 party source to help you get out of this situation. And there are different companies out there. 2 50 Okay, is one of them. There's e data source. There are lots of companies where you can sign up for their services and there will be a staff on board to help you get through this problem. I definitely recommend it. If you're a big e commerce store, you have a massive list of people on your list. It may be worth the investment. In working with one of these third party companies, I look forward to seeing your class assignments. Make sure you submit those so you can get feedback from me and from the community