What if all your emails are heading straight to spam? ?

And Gmail lands in Spam?

? Gmail is one of the most important email providers.

Gmail relies on user feedback. Basically, it tracks all the actions you make after receiving an email: marking the email as spam, replying to the email, moving it to the Junk folder. These explicit actions have a direct relation to how Gmail classifies the email for the given user.

This makes total sense because Gmail favors emails you want to read and you are interested in, but penalize emails you marked as spam or deleted.

For example: If you get an email from your mother you will probably read it and reply to it. That’s a great indicator for Gmail that you are interested in that email and that is relevant for you, so in the future, it will keep placing your mom’s email to the primary inbox. And this will overall improve your mom’s sender reputation. ✔️

Instead, if you get an email from someone you don’t know you will probably delete it or mark it as spam. This will impact negatively his sender reputation and increase the chances that Gmail will place his email in the spam folder next time (even to new, unrelated users).❌

? Some other things that Gmail looks for:

✅Reduce the size of the images. Usually under 100 kb is fine.
✅Reduce the number of links to 3 or less per email.
✅Change the tone of your message. Marketing emails can feel redundant after awhile. Test what kind of tone resonates with your contacts the best. Maybe your messages can be more playful instead of professional.
✅Encourage a reply to your email as this is one of the metrics Gmail looks at when deciding where to place your message.

However, keep in mind that these tips are useless if you send your emails to an unengaged segment that won’t open your email. Sending your emails to engaged people will increase your sender reputation over time, and ensuring your email is delivered to the inbox consistently.

Actionable steps to take when facing Spam Issues:

1. Deactivate all the current Flows and leave only Welcome and Cart Abandonment.
2. Remake the templates as plain text as possible and leave only 2 emails per flow. Leaving more emails will get lower open rates and we don’t what that.
3. Make a Pop-Up and give people an incentive to subscribe. You need a strong lead magnet, for example, a discount.
   If the email lands on Spam they will be willing to search for it since they want that discount.
   
4. Add a success image after they subscribe via the popup. It should say “If you don’t find your discount code please check you Promo and Spam folders”. In this way, they know that if they don’t find the email probably is in the Spam folder and they will look for it.
   
5. Create a segment of really engaged people that opened or clicked at least 1 email in the past days. You can play around with the time frame and find one that will get you 20%+ open rate. Make sure to exclude bouncers and people that are suppressed.
   
6. Start sending them regular campaigns. Make sure they are relevant and interesting for the segment. Cool promos, offers, etc. – The main purpose is to make them open the emails.
   

GENERAL ADVICE:

When doing email marketing in a brand new account, the best thing is to start sending campaigns only to engaged people that will open your emails. ? For example, recent buyers and recent subscribers. At first, your email list will be small, but you can build it up if you keep them engaged and you run enough traffic to your website.

❗It’s crucial that you get good open rates. Since you are sending emails from a fresh account you don’t have a sender reputation yet. But you can rapidly get a good reputation by sending to engaged people. This is called a “Warm Up” period. Trust me it is much easier to start with the right foot than messing up and trying to solve everything later. This will save you a lot of issues and frustration.?

Ettore, Hustler Marketing