It turns out the campaigns you’ve worked so hard on are landing in spam - now what?
As you know, getting your email deliverability right is harder than it ever has been. Teams that stick to what worked a few years ago are landing in spam regularly. Both new teams and experienced teams. Are you landing in spam?
There are metrics to look for as minimum benchmarks when you want to know if your campaign is performing well. That alone won’t give you a concrete answer on whether you are actually landing in spam or not. Once you’ve diagnosed what’s gone wrong, you can take action to resolve it.
These are all proactive measures. If you wait until your open rates tank, it’s likely too late. If you wait until Google or Microsoft suspends one of your email accounts, it’s definitely too late and you can skip ahead to the section on getting out of spam.
There are three key ways to determine whether you are landing in spam or not.
Your first step is to identify how bad the damage is. Once you’ve assessed how bad your status is, you can then look into the root cause and how to undo this damage.
Email warmup tools allow you to send and receive emails from a network of email addresses connected to a host. By sending and receiving these emails, you are able to tell whether you are landing in spam or not.
Email placement testing works very similarly to email warmup. The concept is the same - send an email to a network of email addresses that are owned by the provider you work with. That way, you’ll be able to tell exactly how many of your emails are landing in spam.
You can also tell how your emails perform when sending to Gmail vs. Outlook vs. other email service providers.
Use tools like Mailreach and Glock Apps to get accurate placement testing. This feature is starting to become more commonly found and can even be done for free with some tools.
A deliverability test won’t give you results that are as straightforward as email warmup or placement testing. Instead, you’ll get to know more about the underlying issues you may be facing.
You will get a score out of 10 that will identify any issues you may have with your domain reputation, IP reputation, email formatting, blacklists you may be listed on, and DNS configuration.
This can be done for free with tools like Mail Tester or MailGenius.com.
If you’re sending emails through Google Worksapce, you can begin with Google’s Postmaster Tools to assess your domain’s sending reputation.
Deliverability tests will let you know if you’ve been blacklisted anywhere.
Having your IP address blacklisted as opposed to your domain being lacklisted point to different causes.
A blacklist of your IP address means that there is an issue with one of:
Each of these problems come with straightforward solutions. You can adjust your email volume, adjust your DNS settings, or switch to better email sending software.
If your domain has been blacklisted, there is an issue with:
In this case, the problem is directly related to your email sending practices. Read through our Outbound Email Guide to check where you may be making mistakes.
The whitelisting process is fairly simple.
Usually, you will be let off and can resume your sending again.
We’ve helped 40+ teams with their outbound. Our first step is usually to put them onto our sending infrastructure so they don’t need to rely on Google or Microsoft anymore.
We also help them deal with issues to their main domain if it’s sending reputation has been damaged. The most common blacklists we see our new clients end up on are:
Once you know there is an issue, the first thing you should do is pause all of your outbound messaging. You are just worsening your reputation if you continue to send lots of emails without solving your deliverability issues. Depending on how bad things are, you might have to pause messaging on the domain in question altogether, rather than just the email address that has been flagged.
This is why we have all our clients sending from multiple domains. If an email address gets into spam trouble, we can quickly replace it with one of our backup domains that has been warming up without taking a big hit to our deliverability. Most teams we speak to who are running into issues are sending all of their outreach from a single domain, and can’t afford to completely shut off their outreach when they run into deliverability issues.
Warming up your email accounts isn’t just done for the sake of diagnosis. Email warmup helps you build your sending reputation back up. Behind the scenes, your email account is sending emails to a network of hundreds of thousands of email accounts. These accounts mark your email as “important”. They pull your emails out of spam if they land there. Then they respond to your emails to show that your email account is reliable.
Pick the email warmup tool that makes the most sense for your team and ramp up your warmup volume slowly. Email warmup will also help you see how quickly your email account is recovering by showing you how much of your email lands into spam every day.
The best way to avoid all of this is to never end up in the spam folder in the first place.
Getting out of spam is still a bit of black box. Nothing is guaranteed here - start preparing other domains for outreach in case this can’t be resolved
The best defense is to be prepared. Having other domains in warmup or rotation means you never have to compromise on your outbound volume. Following cold email best practices means you don’t have to get out of spam in the first place.
Because this is so common, I have to note that if you have an account temporarily suspended by Google, this is not a death blow to your email account. It is, however, a strong warning sign that you have one or more things that are seriously off at the moment.
We help founders and sales leaders solve this by handling your entire outbound email (and LinkedIn) motion. Zevenue writes your campaigns, manages your sending infrastructure, and handles all your lead list building and troubleshooting to give you differentiated, unique campaigns that lead to real sales pipeline. If you’re working on this right now, let us know what questions you have. Send us a message and we’ll be glad to help
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