Learn How to Stop Sending Emails Into Spam in Magento

Emails might seem like a traditional marketing approach, but it still works. You might find it hard to believe it if your emails continuously land in the spam folder.

In a Magento store, sending emails is a part of the day-to-day activity to keep the customers informed about their order status, product delivery, and more. And if your email keeps landing in the spam folder, it can definitely get frustrating. Therefore, it is essential to understand the why behind it and take the needed action.

Here in this blog, we have focused exactly on why and how to send spam-free emails. Learn how to stop sending emails into spam in Magento with practical tips to enjoy maximum deliverability and visibility. 🚀

Table of Contents  

• How Do Spam Filters Work?
• How to Avoid Sending Spam Emails in Magento

How Do Spam Filters Work?

Email service providers, also known as ESPs, always aim to deliver only relevant emails to the primary inbox. It uses various mechanisms and considers multiple factors to understand the quality of email before delivering it to the primary folder. Here are some common spam factors:

• Blacklists and Whitelists: The spam filters have a complete list of blacklisted domains and IP addresses which they consider spam and don’t allow to even consider delivering in the primary inbox. On the other hand, whitelisted domains have a green signal, as they are authentic senders.
• Sender Reputation: When a sender’s reputation is not up to the mark, the spam filter doesn’t trust the sender of the email. They look for a well-reputed sender reputation, having all the email authentications in place with a good domain reputation.
• Content Analysis: If your content contains any spam-triggering words or might look suspicious to the spam filters, they won’t wait to consider your email as spam. They majorly focus on the keywords and words used in the email subject line and the body copy.
• Machine learning: Spam filters use machine learning to understand an email and find techniques to measure its spamminess. The machine learning algorithm keeps looking for techniques and patterns to further analyze an email.

How To Avoid Sending Spam Emails In Magento 

Now, let’s understand practical ways to avoid spam emails in Magento. To make it easier, we have divided our list into 3 parts:

1. Keep Your Domain Reputation Clean
2. Optimize Your IP Address
3. Write Spam-Free Content

Let’s get into the details of each point.

1. Keep Your Domain Reputation Clean

This is the first and the most essential step in having better email deliverability. A clean domain reputation builds trust in the eyes of the spam filters and ESP. Here are the actionable steps to have a good domain reputation.

A. Keep the CAN-SPAM Act in mind 

The CAN-SPAM Act is a law governing emails. The act ensures that all email sending activity is happening within ethical boundaries. They have set multiple rules and regulations for the sender, and in case the sender breaks the law, they have to pay a penalty. Here are some key highlights of the CAN-SPAM Act:

• Offer an unsubscribe button to make it easy for the users to opt-out anytime
• Clearly communicate the main intent of the emails to your users without using any harmful tone or language
• Don’t offer any misleading information

B. Use a good age domain

A good old domain helps to build credibility over newer ones, as its stability and longevity play a key role in building a positive reputation. 

It is essential to have a clear sending history to improve the chances of landing in the primary inbox. If you are having a completely new domain, we recommend doing an email warm-up practice before shooting all your emails.

Email warm-up is an activity of sending small batches of emails first and slowly improving the number of emails to build a positive domain reputation.

C. Use your domain to send emails

It is a highly recommended practice to use your domain while sending your emails to make it look more professional. Imagine getting an email about your order status from the following two email ids. Which one do you think is more trustworthy? [email protected] or [email protected]

The second one helps to build a good impression in the mind of your shoppers and gives you an extra edge while sending emails.

D. Restrict the number of emails per domain

Every email service provider has a certain sending limit. If you knowingly or unknowingly exceed the limit, it can negatively impact your domain. You need to plan and send your emails. Here is the sending limit of different email service providers.

• Free Gmail Account – 100 emails via SMTP/ 500 emails via browser
• G suite – 2000 emails per day
• Office 365 – 10,000 recipients

E. Use an exclusive domain to conduct small activities

Creating exclusive email domains can help you personalize your activities and only manage queries based on that domain. You can properly streamline your workflow, prioritize messages, and build a good reputation over a period of time.

For instance, you can have a separate domain for your customer service [email protected] and a separate domain for your general conversation with your shoppers [email protected]. Such personalization helps you to manage the email domain better and leaves no room for confusion for your customers.

2. Optimize Your IP Address

Your IP Address is a unique address of your server to send emails. Here are some of the best optimization practices you need to keep in mind.

A. Have a dedicated IP address

It is always better to have a dedicated IP rather than shared IP because the latter one can have spammers, which can indirectly mark you as a spammer. A dedicated IP is a safe option to ensure it doesn’t affect your email deliverability.

B. Set your email authentication (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC)

These are email authentications that email service providers proactively look for while analyzing the authenticity of a sender. You need to set all three email authentications, and you will need a DNS record to add them.

• SPF – SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework that prevents spoofing by verifying your IP address. This framework verifies that emails coming from your domain with your verified domain and IP address.
• DKIM – DKIM stands for DomainKeys Identified Mail. This authentication adds an email signature in the header of your email, which the email servers validate in the DNS record.
• DMARC – DMARC stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance. This protocol needs SPF and DMARC records to deliver your email to the primary inbox.

C. SMTP

SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol which allows you to send and receive emails effectively. SMTP acts like a post office for emails that deliver emails from one server to the other with ease. There are various ways to integrate SMTP servers. But unfortunately, Magento doesn’t offer a direct way to integrate SMTP. One of the effective ways, you can add SMTP to your Magento store is by using our Magento 2 SMTP extension.

You can easily minimize the chances of your emails landing in the spam folder, and enjoy benefits like:

• Option to send test emails to get the look and feel of your email
•  Get a complete backend of your emails from the “Email Log”
• Supports three main providers: Mandrill, Amazon AWS, and Gmail.

Get your STMP extension for FREE here.

3. Write Spam-Free Content

Ensure you are writing emails that are not only reader-friendly but also spam-free. The main goal while writing your email should be to keep it straightforward and clear. The better you write, the more your intent will be clear to the email service provider.

A. Avoid spam trigger words

Spam-triggering words can raise a red flag that directly lands your email in the spam folder. You should be careful with the words and sentences you use while drafting your email.

If your content has words like “free,” “discount,” “buy now,” or excessive use of exclamation marks, they considered spam. Avoid using such terms and opt for a personalized approach while writing your email. This will help you make your content more specific and relatable.

B. Keep a balance of HTML-to-text ratio 

It is better to keep a good balance of the HTML-to-text ratio. It might happen that the HTML email doesn’t properly views within your customer’s device. Plain text can help you improve readability and accessibility across different platforms. There is no ideal HTML-to-text ratio. We recommend avoiding large image files or blocks of HTML codes that don’t serve the purpose.

C. Don’t use too many images 

We recommend this Magento store owner to only use images only when needed. Too many images can miscommunicate the main message. Only use images if it adds value to the context of your email or if you want to communicate any exclusive deal.

More Ways To Avoid Sending Spam Emails in Magento

1. Send emails only to your subscribers 

Only send emails to your subscribers who have subscribed to receive your emails. If you send emails to users who have not subscribed to your newsletter, they can make you a spammer. This can be extremely harmful to your domain reputation. And you can even get blacklisted if multiple users mark you as a spammer.

2. Avoid buying an email list

Buying an email list is not a healthy practice. It does give you a handful of emails ID, but you can’t be sure if those are authentic emails.

It might have unverified emails that can increase your bounce rate and badly effecting your email deliverability. As much as possible, avoid buying email lists. Here you can even try to build your list of authentic users.

3. Verify & test your email before sending them 

It is always better to take certain measures before sending your email. You can use various tools to verify your email id before sending them to minimize the bounce rate. Tools like hunter.io, Neverbounce, and even Zero bounce help you to check your email id.

4. Handling complaints and unsubscribes effectively

As we mentioned earlier, adding an unsubscribe option is a must. This will help the users easily opt out and keep you within the rules of the CAN-SPAM Act. Mostly, you can place this link at the end of your email body content or the footer.

Conclusion

We hope it has become easier for you now to know why emails don’t land in the primary folder and how to stop sending emails into spam in Magento.

You can implement these at any point in your email sending journey. So, we encourage you to try these out and visible results in your email deliverability. If you liked this blog, do share it with your Magento friends and help them overcome the deliverability challenges.

Thank you for reading!