What causes emails to go to spam?

Email providers look for a number of factors when deciding whether to automatically send your emails to spam. If you’ve made it on an email blacklist, that means you’ve repeatedly sent emails to recipients who haven’t signed up for your email list.

Your emails can get sent to spam if you:

• Don’t include an unsubscribe button in your email
• Send poorly-designed emails with broken or glitchy code
• Address your recipient by “my friend” or “dear” (or not by their name)
• Buy email lists online and mass-send messages to email addresses that don’t exist (resulting in a high bounce rate)
• Use all-caps text and extreme punctuation (!!!!! or ?????)
• Include strangely formatted fonts (𝖑𝖎𝖐𝖊 𝖙𝖍𝖎𝖘)
• Provide links to fraudulent websites

Email providers only want to deliver emails from high-reputation senders. To be a high-reputation sender, do the following:

• Include an unsubscribe button
• Design your emails with clean code using our templates.
• Personalize your emails with the recipient’s first name
• Only email those who’ve subscribed to your email list email deliverability high
• Keep the text free of odd formatting and extraneous punctuation
• Only link out to reputable websites

If you meet these criteria, you can get away with using “classic” email spam words in your subject line and your email. The text surrounding the spam phrase also matters, as does your history as an email sender. If email providers don’t have a reason to mistrust you, they simply won’t.