Best tool for transactional and marketing email?
Anshul Raghav
7 replies
We sometimes face issues with our email marketing tool. Whenever we activate our marketing emails, they start getting into spam. If you know the reason behind this and know how to fix it then please share. Or share any tool which could help us counter this fast.
Replies
Lauren Meyer@laurenemailgeek
There are a lot of possible reasons why this is happening. It's hard to know if it's your ESP's problem or something on your side, which would follow you if you change ESPs. Couple of questions: Are you sending from shared IPs or dedicated? Where are you having the issue? i.e. is it only with one provider like gmail.com or is it "everywhere." How did you notice the problem i.e. are recipients complaining about not receiving it in the inbox, or was it based on something like seed testing? And, have you changed anything around the time you noticed the problem?
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Hi @laurenemailgeek. Thank you for your response. We use shared IPs and our own domain for MX. The problem lies with a few email formats. There are 4 email formats that we use. One format is working fine with the same IP and the same configurations. But as soon as we activate the other 3, our emails start getting into spam including the good one. Internet said there might be text or image routes in emails that the spam filters might have picked up. So tried changing a few parts of the email format too, including image routes and texts. But the same behaviour was observed after some time. Checked it using a tool called Mailtester. It was observed with Gmail. It started happening when we accidentally sent mass emails within a short period. We use google for our mail services.
@anshul_raghav thanks for the extra details. Gmail is a very domain-focused mailbox provider and recipient engagement plays a large part in their anti-spam filtering. My suspicion is that those other 3 emails are either triggering higher rates of negative reaction than email #1 (e.g. more spam complaints, emails deleted without opening, etc), resulting in all of them being treated more harshly — or the additional volume coming from the other 3 emails is pushing your volume over the threshold they deem to be "bulk email" (approx 5k emails per day). Are you able to see anything in your sending statistics to suggest high bounce rates or lots of people marking the email as spam could be an issue? Keep in mind, Gmail does not provide a complaint feedback loop that will show up as a spam % within your ESP's reporting, so you'll need to look at other destinations you send to such as Yahoo and Hotmail and assume your spam % is around the same with Gmail. If you are setup with Google Postmaster tools, also check there to see what they think about your sending activity.
IF you feel content may be causing this, check the reputation of your links as the ones within the body can sometimes trigger spam filters. Also try doing some testing where you turn on one of the 3 additional emails back on, but with the content stripped out of it. If it inboxes, then add in your content. If it still inboxes, then include the links. The thing you added ...send it blank, then with a bit of your content, then with the links included. Whatever you added in the test that stopped reaching the inbox may be the problem (or at least contributing to it). Again, keep in mind Gmail's algorithms are very focused on keeping their users happy, so negative reactions to your emails could be a big driver (especially in the absence of positive actions like opening, clicking, replying, forwarding to friends, saving it to folders).
@laurenemailgeek thank you so much for this detailed analysis. Will try the things suggested. We don't have stats for this because when the third time these other emails started creating issues we removed them. Due to these spam email formats, other important emails were also going into spam which was hurting the business. So we removed them from the email strategy.
