Why Your Business Emails Keep Going to Spam and How to Fix It

You send over a quote to a potential customer, follow up on an overdue bill, or respond to a client’s important question. All seems fine from your end until you learn that your email has been filed under their spam folder or hasn’t reached their mail box at all.

An important message not making it through to a client’s inbox is more than a technological failure for a company. It means not getting new deals, having problems with payments, and making your clients unaware of the necessary notifications.

The most irritating aspect is that your messages are totally legitimate. But email service providers have a whole checklist of elements that they consider when determining where your email should land—such as your domain security, sender reputation, contents of the message, and recipient interaction with your email.

The good thing is that you can fully control these factors and improve your email deliverability. Let us see what may be the problem and how to fix it.

1. Your Email Content Appears Fishy or Deceptive

There are words or phrases that may make your email end up in the spam folder but none of them are a definite guarantee.

The spam filters get very quickly triggered in case the email contains several warning factors, like a misleading subject line, suspicious links, strange attachments, odd formatting or even unwanted content.

For example, sending a threatening message saying that your account will be suspended, while promoting a product or service at the same time, will immediately lower your credibility level and make customers click on the “spam” button.

Solution to the problem:

• Your subject line needs to be truthful and descriptive so as to inform subscribers what they are going to read in the email.
• In addition, make sure your sender is recognizable and link destinations are accurate.
• If you are sending fancy HTML emails, preview them on mobile devices.

2. The Reputation of Your Sending Domain or IP is Poor

Email providers determine the reputation of your sending domain and IP through various factors including spam reports, authentication, sending behavior, and recipient behavior.

If people continue to classify your e-mails as spam, your future e-mails will be filtered more carefully. You will also have bad reputations when your account is stolen and spam is sent from your e-mail address.

Even the hosting environment itself might be an issue. Should your service provider use shared outbound mail servers, reputation of a shared IP address may influence delivery. In case of business sites, reliable web hosting services with correct business email configuration is equally necessary.

How to solve it:

• First of all, get yourself familiar with bounce messages, delivery reports and provider notifications about email problems. These will reveal the specific problem that is causing your emails to be blocked, delayed or marked as spam.
• Verify if you’re blocked by any of the relevant blocklists for your domain or IP address.
• Look into the odd behavior which may show that your account has been hijacked.
• Remove the reason for sending unsolicited or unauthorized emails.
• Have your service provider check the issue with your reputation or mail server.

Do not change providers until you have determined the reason. It may be that your domain has a bad reputation due to spam reports or poor sending practices, but changing servers will not necessarily help this.

3. Domain Authentication Is Not Correctly Configured

One of the first things that should be checked is the presence of the correct domain authentication configuration.

The three technologies that enable this are SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. When combined, they are used to perform a type of online verification so the receiving server knows the sender and whether the email really comes from him or not.

1. SPF (Sender Policy Framework): List of email servers permitted to use a certain domain for sending emails.
2. DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail): This technology attaches a digital signature to your emails which is difficult to fake and easy to verify by receiving servers.
3. DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance): Compares your SPF or DKIM validation results with the domain associated with your visible “From” address, and instructs email providers on what should be done in case of failure (such as putting the email in the spam folder or rejecting it outright).

In case these records are not available or incorrectly configured, your emails won’t pass the security checks, and the odds of them being rejected or automatically placed in spam become very high.

Solution:

• Go to your DNS settings for your domain and compare them with the settings that your email provider suggests. If you require assistance with finding or modifying these records, please refer to HarmonWeb’s directions for modifying DNS records.
• Ensure that SPF has authorised your sending services to send emails, DKIM signing is active, and DMARC is set up properly. In case you have more than one email platform, make sure that all platforms are included without causing conflicting SPF entries.
• Use DMARC monitoring in case you first want to learn who is sending emails on your behalf before implementing other policies. Wrong execution may lead to failure in the delivery of genuine messages.
• Google requires Gmail senders to authenticate via SPF or DKIM, but a bulk sender needs to satisfy more requirements such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Refer to Google email sender guidelines for more information.

For further reading, see the guide to DNS records and their uses on HarmonWeb.

4. Too Many Emails Are Being Sent Too Fast

Think about your company sending just a few dozen emails per day. Then you do a campaign and send thousands of marketing emails in one hour. Such a drastic change will likely draw even more attention, particularly if you have a fresh domain or sending record.

A large burst can lead to rate limiting, deferrals, or even further filtering. Legitimate messages might still have difficulty reaching their intended recipients when you make drastic changes to your sending rate.

How to solve this:

• Make sure that your sending patterns remain constant and increase your sending volumes gradually as your business requires reaching out to more people.
• In case of marketing campaigns, start off with subscribers who have opted in to receive communications from you. Adhere to the sending limits set by your email service.
• Do not use incremental delivery as a means of making spam emails legitimate. Always send emails to appropriate parties and always abide by any email policies and guidelines that apply.
• For large-volume emailing campaigns, using an established email marketing firm could be a better choice than your regular business inbox.

5. Your Email Setup Is Wrong

Other times, the issue is not with the content of your email but with its setup.

For instance, you might have incorrect outbound mail server settings on your email client, your provider may not have DKIM signed your emails, or your DNS settings may not be compatible with the service.

Another reason why email authentication issues may arise is when your website, hosting, and corporate email all use separate senders.

How to fix it:

• Refer to the setup guidelines from your email hosting company and make sure that your DNS is configured according to their specifications.
• Test send an email to a mailbox you have on a different email platform. Ideally, take a look at the headers of that email.
• Passing authentication doesn’t ensure inbox delivery, but it definitely helps in eliminating important configuration issues.
• In case you are using the company emails from your hosting, it’s better to contact its technical support and check the outgoing mail server and authentication details.

6. Invalid or Uninterested People Are on Your Email List

An old mailing list may work against you when it comes to delivering emails to subscribers. The reasons could be that some email addresses might be defunct, and others might not even want to hear from you anymore.

Continually sending emails to invalid email addresses will result in hard bounces. Undesired messages may also cause spam complaints, negatively affecting your sending reputation.

The solution:

• Examine your email list and delete those addresses which consistently fail to deliver.
• Send commercial messages only to those who have the appropriate permission and make it easy to unsubscribe.
• Pay attention to engagement, too. If your subscribers constantly ignore your messages, perhaps you should conduct a related re-engagement campaign prior to unsubscribing them.
• Nevertheless, do not depend only on email opens. Features such as privacy and automation can distort your results. You may have to use clicks, responses, sales, and other actions for a better assessment.
• Do not purchase email lists. In addition to possible complaints and low deliverability rates, purchased addresses often lack the true interest needed for an email campaign to be successful.

Discovering the Reason for Your Company’s Emails Going to Spam Folders

Instead of doing a complete overhaul, let the symptoms be your guide.

In the case of Gmail, those who qualify can use Google Postmaster Tools to access information regarding their domain reputation, authentication, and spam rates.

Send your test emails through various email clients and see whether they are delivered to the inbox, put into spam, or do not come at all. It should be kept in mind that delivering successfully to one test email does not mean the same for all recipients.

For instance, HarmonWeb’s Email Spam Filtering describes how email filtering analyzes suspicious emails and possible threats like that of sender reputation.

Conclusion

If you keep noticing that your business emails go into the spam folder regularly, then it is not something to get too worried about. This will most likely be due to a combination of missing authentication data, damaged reputation of the sender, increased volume of sending, dirty mailing list or even small DNS problems.

First, make sure that your setup is correct and that you do not face any delivery errors, and also check your sending practices, your recipient list and your email content. In case there are any issues that persist, ask your email provider to audit your sending environment and reputation.

The point here is not only to find a way through the filters and make one email land in the inbox but establish an effective system for the communication of your business with its customers.

Looking for Reliable Email For Your Business?

Professional communications presuppose much more than using a business email. Good authentication, reliable mail server and effective sending strategy – these are the key components that will ensure successful delivery of your emails.

We at HarmonWeb will help you choose the best hosting solution for your website and beyond. Find a solution that will be growing together with your business and will allow you to communicate with your clients without worries.