One of life’s frustrations is to find out that your email has gone to Spam.  So how do you prevent this from happening time and again?

How to ensure you always get emails from a sender

Add the particular sender’s email address to your contacts or address book.  This should mean that future emails from them should head to the right place and not end up in spam.  For other sporadic emails that are sat in spam, you can click on the email and click “Not Spam”.  Your email provider should learn to categorise these in future and put them in your inbox.

Ask email contacts / subscribers to whitelist your email address

There is a similar approach if you are the sender of important emails or newsletters.  When you send a welcome email to new clients or subscribers, ask them to whitelist your email address by adding it to their contacts or safe list of senders.  Remember time is precious so including instructions on how to do this.  We like Clean Email’s instructions for Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo and more email providers.

Avoid spam triggers

Consider the following points when sending out your emails:

• If you are sending newsletters, make sure you give the receiver an unsubscribe link
• Proof read your emails – if they are full of typos, capitals and bad grammar then the email filter may flag it up as a suspected phishing email
• Limit attachments – again anti-virus software is on the lookout for suspicious attachments which may carry viruses or spyware
• Think carefully about the subject line – does it look spammy?

How to avoid spammy subject lines

There used to be trigger words which would send your email to spam.  These days technology is more sophisticated so do think about the following when crafting your email subject line:

• Avoid active questions like “Do you have / want / like…?”
• Limit the use of punctuation, anything above two punctuation marks gets the spam sirens blaring
• ALL CAPITALS is a no-no too!
• Ensure the subject line ties in with the email content
• Avoid using “Re:” and “Fwd:” as this can be flagged as spam
• Don’t use trigger words such as “Free”, “$”… Hubspot have 394 words to avoid!

Use a spam checking tool

Before sending out your next email campaign, why don’t you run it through a spam checking tool such as Emailable or Glock Apps. Glock Apps will give you 3 free spam tests, just send them a copy of your message and you’ll receive a spam score report within seconds.

Protect yourself against spam with a SPF Record (Sender Policy Framework)

Now for the technical bit, an SPF record can prevent the sending of spam using your email address.  SPF is a spam protection method based on the authorisation of the email sender.  Ionos have a step-by-step guide to create a SPF record.  Gmail Help Centre also have a section on ensuring your messages are authenticated.

For more business tips, do keep checking the Red Desk blog as we publish articles on a regular basis.