Why your emails end up in the spam folder

Yesterday I got an email from IKEA. It went to my spam folder.

Why? I like IKEA. I have no problem admitting it. I go to one of their stores a couple of times a month and I have followed the IKEA Hackers blog for years.

But their latest newsletter landed in spam in Gmail, and I have noticed it happening more and more. An electronics chain, a baby goods shop, a car manufacturer, a marketplace — all of them end up in my spam folder, even though the content is good and I signed up myself.

It is not the senders’ fault. It is mine. I am fairly bad at getting round to reading a lot of the newsletters I receive, and Gmail knows it. Gmail watches every click I make in my inbox and learns from it.

If I have not read the baby shop’s newsletter for several weeks running, I am probably not genuinely interested in their email — so Gmail helpfully moves it to spam.

They are lucky in one sense: the problem does not apply to all their Gmail recipients, only the ones who rarely read. That does not mean they should ignore it.

What counts as spam changed

“Spam” used to mean email you never asked for: newsletters you never signed up to, adverts for cheap loans, advance-fee fraud. For a younger generation of users it came to mean something else — everything they cannot be bothered to read. A newsletter they signed up for themselves, and once read with interest, can become spam in their eyes because a subject line was dull.

That left the providers with a problem. Gmail and Outlook want to present an interesting inbox, because they know a manageable, engaging inbox brings users back more often.

So they followed the shift and changed their own definition to match. The spam filters were adapted to the new reality, judging a sender and a message on different criteria than before. Content matters less in the analysis now; the sender, and how people reacted to that sender’s previous messages, is the most important signal.

Every sender has two scores

It means every sender has an overall score in the filter — and also a score for each individual recipient they have sent to.

Take a scale from 0 to 100. A shop might have an overall score of 75, because most of their recipients are happy with their email. But their score on my profile could be 25, because I rarely read it. If the line between spam and inbox sits at 50, their mail goes to my spam folder while most of their recipients get it in the inbox.

And if more and more of their recipients behave the way I do, because the newsletter fails to hold interest, the overall score falls too — drifting towards the line where most of their email is filtered rather than delivered.

The personal spam filter

So you can no longer assume that a message reaching your inbox in Gmail reaches every inbox in Gmail. The filter has become personal, adapting to each person’s behaviour to keep their inbox tidy.

For anyone sending email marketing, that is an interesting challenge rather than a disaster — if you use it. Adapt to the signals your recipients give you and you can expect more readers, happier recipients, and a smaller bill from your email provider, because you send to fewer people for the same result.

Because you should expect that a recipient who has not read your last several messages will find the next one in her spam folder. And there it stays, until she moves one of them back to the inbox and tells her provider the filter got it wrong.

Catch the signal

This is the signal to take seriously. If you send again and again to 5,000 recipients and the same 1,000 open, you are doing too little about the remaining 4,000. That counts against you with Gmail and Outlook.

Let the assessment fall far enough and your mail starts reaching the spam folder for more and more recipients — including the ones who do read you now and then. If they do not move your mail back, the problem spreads.

So look critically at your list and consider what you can do to reactivate the group that does not read. If you cannot reactivate them, cut them.

Yes, it hurts to remove recipients you spent time, effort and money to acquire. But they risk doing more harm than good. If someone has not read a single newsletter in twelve months, the chance that they suddenly open one tomorrow and spend a lot of money with you is very small.

Meanwhile they cost you readers every time you send, because they signal to their provider that your content is uninteresting.

So the first move is to clean up and cut the inactive. The second is to ask why they went inactive.

The personal email

If you send good content to people who signed up themselves, you have a solid basis for a lot of lasting readers.

But the more recipients you gather, the harder it is to write well for all of them. They are at ever more different points in their lives, with different needs, and different reasons for signing up to your newsletter in particular. Their expectations differ, and meeting all of them gets harder.

So you have to target in order to hold interest. You have to divide the big list into smaller ones with different messages.

Those lists should be dynamic, so the same person can appear on several if they have several interests, and you can merge lists when you see the content would be nearly identical anyway. But you have to look at what your recipients are interested in and target accordingly.

That is the only way to hold their interest and reduce the number who drift away. And however well you do it, you still need to clean up regularly, because some people always lose interest.

What you should not see is a negative effect on your open rate and response from cutting inactive recipients — they are inactive, so they contribute nothing to those statistics in the first place.

Think about the quality of sign-ups too

Tell new recipients what to expect in their inbox after they sign up, and use confirmed opt-in, where they click a link in an email before the subscription takes effect.

Competitions can bring in a lot of sign-ups, but ask yourself whether people are signing up to win rather than to read. A recipient who signs up purely for the prize will almost certainly go inactive quickly, and can cost you more than all those new addresses are worth.

One honest caveat

Some will tell you that email platforms like ours cannot track everyone who opens your newsletter. That is correct. We can only register an open when the recipient loads images or clicks a link. So there is a risk of removing active recipients when you clean up.

But — you are removing people who have not loaded a single one of your images or clicked a single one of your links in a long time. What value do they have? What problems do they create?

You can improve the accuracy yourself. If images are integral to your communication, and necessary to understand the message, more recipients will load them. You can also write shorter teasers and have people click through for the full story.

Worth noting too: this applies to B2B and B2C senders alike. It applies especially to providers like Gmail and Outlook, but there is little doubt that the approach spreads to most other providers over time.

Which is why the time to clean up is now.