Why Your Emails Go to Spam and What to Do About it?

Email marketing can be very rewarding until you bump across the dreaded word - spam. Something similar happened with a client recently.

Until last Friday, all her emails were just fine and her open rates were decent. And something happened on Saturday that she didn't expected.

On Saturday, her open rate plummeted.

When we investigated the issue, we discovered that half of them are in spam. The client told us how she'd past that subject line into the spam word checker and ensure that the right words are used.

The issue isn't the spam words themselves.

The core problem is deliverability and it isn't decided in one session.

Deliverability is nothing but a reputation score that gets built over a period of time. On top of it, it is about eight sending habits, and the words in your email are the smallest part of it.

The framework below is from the Ground Rules chapter of my book, Ultimate Email Marketing Plan, and the order matters more than any single step in it.

You need to work through each step from start to finish.

First, let me answer the question:

Why are my emails going to spam?

When a mailbox provider decides that your email does not belong in the inbox, it is sent to the spam folder instead. And that decision is mainly about your sender reputation, not your subject line.

Your sending domain carries a score. That is the address your email comes from. If your score is above 90 and your email generally lands in the Inbox. And when it goes below 90, it is a warning sign.

It is important to note that the score is not a single pass or fail: it accumulates and decays over time.

So a handful of spam complaints won't kill it overnight, and one good send will not repair a damaged one.

You can check the reputation score for free at senderscore.org.

What moves the score is what your subscribers do with the mail. Four actions push it up: reading the email, replying to it, forwarding it, and marking it as not spam. Two pull it down: marking it as spam, and deleting it before reading, which reads to the provider as irrelevance. Every send nudges the number one way or the other.

So what has actually gone wrong? You have been sending mail that people are not opening, to addresses that should not still be on your list. Most email deliverability issues come down to that one pattern. The usual triggers:

• A one-off blast to a segment you do not normally email.
• A batch of old addresses that have not engaged in a year or more.
• A purchased, scraped or rented list.
• A new sending domain or IP with no track record.
• A sudden jump in send volume.

What is the first thing to change when mail stops landing?

Picture mopping a kitchen floor while the tap is still running. That is a subject-line audit on a domain that is scoring 78. You can do it all day and the puddle stays.

Start with who instead of what.

Check your sender score, then fix who you are sending to. In that order. Do not open your templates yet.

Because the reputation score is built from subscriber actions, and the fastest way to change those actions is to stop sending to people who were never going to take them.

Here is the order to actually work through, top to bottom:

Every step above will improve email deliverability more than any wording change you could make. Most people run step 5 first, tidy their subject lines, and then wonder why nothing moved.

If you use double opt-in on your signup form, keep it. It lowers your signup rate and it produces a cleaner list with fewer complaints and better inbox placement. Under stricter anti-spam rules it is not optional anyway.

Does email content cause spam filtering?

Using words like "Free", "guarantee" and an exclamation mark rarely kill your sender reputation.

Now I am not discounting the content completely.

Content does matters in two real ways:

The first is design. A graphics-heavy HTML email is more likely to be sorted into the Promotions tab, which is not spam but is not the inbox either. A plain email, black text and blue links, carries the lowest cognitive load, so the subscriber actually reads it instead of decoding a layout. Reading is one of the four signals that lift your score, so plain text is quietly a deliverability tactic.

Should you rip out every image, then? No. Just stop treating a heavy template as the safe default when a plain one gets read more.

The second is that an email spam content checker measures the wrong thing. It scores your text against a fixed list of words. Mailbox providers stopped leaning on those lists years ago. They watch behaviour now. A clean score from one of those tools tells you nothing about whether your next send lands.

Content does trip filters in specific, mechanical cases: broken HTML, a visible sender name that does not match your authenticated domain, link shorteners, a single large image with no text, or a link to a domain that is itself blacklisted. Fix those first.

How long does it take to recover deliverability?

Recovering deliverability of a domain name is a function of how badly it scores in terms of reputation. If the score is extremely low like below 50 or something, it could take weeks of consistent actions before you see the results.

Since reputation accumulates and decays over time, there is no action that resets it. A damaged score climbs back the way it fell: gradually, on repeated good sends to people who want the mail.

Can you speed it up? Only by removing the cause first, and then sending more of the right mail, not less.

A small dip from one bad send tends to clear in two to four weeks of steady sending.

While a domain that blasted a stale list for months can take two to three months, and sometimes warming a fresh subdomain is faster than rehabilitating the old one.

One thing reliably makes recovery take longer than it should: sending less. When you stop sending emails alltogether, your reputation doesn't improve. It stays where it is.

Simply because the score is built from positive interactions, and you get none of those while you are silent. Keep sending. Send to your engaged segment only, on a steady schedule, and let the good signals stack up.

Start here

Open senderscore.org and Google Postmaster Tools and write the number down. Then work down the list: cut the unengaged, steady the schedule, check the blacklists, and leave the copy until last.

If the score is above 90 and your email is still going to spam, the problem is authentication, not reputation.

Read our article on SPF, DKIM and DMARC, to learn more about building the a strong foundation for email deliverability first.