JM3
Do you have any spam folder horror stories?
It goes without saying (but I'm saying it anyway!) that no email marketers wants their emails to end up in the spam folder. But despite all our best efforts they do sometimes end up in the spam folder. Even with clear subject lines, great designs with the perfect ratio of live text to images, and having a regular send pattern.
What's an email marketer to do? Has this happened to any of you guys here? What did you do?
I'd love to hear about your spam folder experiences and any advice on how you managed to get yourself out of the spam folder and back into the inbox.
This was back in 2014, when I first started sending out both transactional and marketing emails. Our transactional emails started going to the spam folder of customers during the time when we had a lot of orders coming through. These were important because they contained the tracking number for their shipment. And then, when I started sending out marketing emails with discount coupons, we had a hard time getting it to their inbox.
What we did was that we removed the company name from the email subject. It was set up in such a way that the company name is automatically included in the email title. What we did was that we removed the company name in the email title and sent out an email asking clients to add us to their contacts list.
When I started using various email titles and headers, that seemed to work. This was for my previous online store. I had just a few thousand followers, and most customers were repeat clients and we personally connect through social media as well, so it wasn't hard to ask them to add us to their address book.
But then again, this was way back in 2014 to 2015. Email marketing has since evolved. :)
Yes, ALL of our emails (just based on previous reputation before I took this role) automatically end up in the gmail spam box, regardless of the content, it's based on ip/domain.
It's a nightmare and I'm not sure how we will ever get back on the good side.
If I ever fix it, I'll be sure to write something about it...
Hope you do manage to find a fix for your problems, Devon. Do you have any backstory as to how or why the reputation got so badly hammered before you took on your role?
Well that's the frustrating part, I have no idea what happened before that caused us to be put in such a position, and wish I could tell you all so that you can avoid the same mistake. No one was aware of it either until I started doing some deliverability testing my first week and broke the news. The person before me wasn't trained and didn't have the knowledge of best practices, but it's been a great learning experience for me! It's challenging since 50% of our database is gmail, and at most only 4% open the emails.
Yowch! Have you tried a re-warm up strategy already? Send to those 4% of gmail.com subs that are (magically) getting it for the next send, then send to 8% (including 4% of non openers that USED to open or something?), and work your way back up to the full list when you think you're back on track? I haven't been overwhelmed with the usefulness with Gmail's feedback loop, but maybe by signing up for it at least, you could learn something in aggregate (or they'll know you're trying to play by the rules)? Glad you found the deliverability issue early on when you got there!
I had someone set up the FBL, but I'll have to ask them about recent results. I've thought about rewarm up, but not sure if that'll help because this is based on reputation, and...gmail just does things differently than just being traditionally blacklisted. My next strategy is to create opt-in emails that go out to everyone once they are added to the db. We might end up burning the domain and ip and using a new one.
Wish I knew before :/