WHY ARE MY EMAILS GOING TO SPAM?

Every once in a while, I’ll scroll through my spam folder. And you know what I find?

Stuffed between the obvious phishing scams and illicit content filtered by my email provider are dozens, sometimes hundreds of earnest fundraising appeals from candidates and grassroots organizations trying to raise the money they need to run effective campaigns.

Yikes. This is not the kind of content you want showing up next to your brand – assuming people see your message at all.

In the recent election, I saw emails from dozens of high-profile candidates spending huge sums of money on their digital fundraising, and they ALL landed in spam.

Why ARE my emails going to spam?

There are several reasons this happens.

1. Bad Data Management Practices

If the person managing your contact database isn’t taking care to clean up bad data and guarantee clean uploads, you’re likely to send out emails with symbols or error messages in place of someone’s name. That triggers spam warnings with email providers.

2. Unethical Contact Sourcing

If you are (even unwittingly) working with an unethical data broker, you’ll end up sending emails to an audience more likely to flag your message as spam. This will lead to a spike in spam reports or unsubscribes that may cause your email platform to revoke your sending privileges – possibly permanently.

3. Poor Sending Practices

Do you know what kind of subject lines are more likely to trigger automatic spam filters? Do you know what keywords to avoid (or which ones to use) to make the algorithm happy? Are you sending too many emails? Or sending at odd times? Does your email contain formatting that looks spammy? Any one of these (and many more) could be contributing to your spam problem – and this means people aren’t reading your message.

4. Improper Domain Management

Your email team needs to be in close communication with your domain manager. If systems are not synced up, or changes are made to your webhost, and settings are not aligned and verified with your email delivery platform, the system will treat your messages like spam – and may block you from sending messages at all.

All of this can have unintended consequences:

• You’re spending money to send emails that aren’t reaching your supporters, and it’s costing you contributions.

• It hurts your reputation and credibility by making your communications look unprofessional.

• Each time your email goes to spam, it trains the algorithm to send future messages from your domain to spam – including internal communications between campaign staff.

• Worst of all, your domain could end up permanently blacklisted, meaning you have to start over from scratch.

How can I get out of the spam trap?

The good news is that if your emails have been going to spam, there IS a path forward.

It takes time to rebuild your sender reputation and requires careful database management. You’ll need to send emails in small batches of no more than a few hundred people at a time, and you’ll need to carefully target your messages to go to only your most engaged supporters.

You will also need to do a complete audit of your database, clean up any bad data, remove any contacts you don’t need, and make sure your targeting is accurate.

You may also need to buy alternative domains to send emails from until your original domain can be restored, or even change domains permanently.

These are just a few of the tactics that can reverse your fortunes and get your emails landing back in peoples’ inboxes.

If you’re having a spam problem, the C2G team is here to help. Click below to schedule a call.