Landing in the spam folder is one of the biggest hurdles in email marketing. When your messages are hidden from your audience, your hard work on campaigns goes to waste. Understanding why this happens helps you build trust with both inbox providers and your contacts, ensuring your communication actually gets seen.
Maintaining a high deliverability rate is essential for any successful strategy in Positive User. Before you start sending large-scale campaigns, it is crucial to ensure your setup (like domain authentication) is correctly configured to signal to providers that you are a legitimate sender.
A spam filter is an automated security layer used by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and webmail services to protect people from unwanted or dangerous messages. In Positive User, these filters act as the ultimate judge of whether your campaign reaches the inbox or gets tucked away where nobody looks.
Spam filters act as a gatekeeper for every incoming message. When you send a campaign, the recipient's provider runs the email through a set of logic tests before allowing it through.
The sequence generally follows this flow: You send a campaign → ISP receives the data → Spam filter checks specific factors → Message is routed to "Inbox" or "Spam".
These filters evaluate several key factors to determine your sender reputation:
Email content: Looking for suspicious links or formatting.
Attachments: Large or numerous files can trigger red flags.
Recipient's actions: How often people open your mail or mark it as spam.
Authentication: Verifying that you actually own the domain you are sending from.
For example, if you send an email containing only a large image and no text, a filter might assume you are trying to hide "spammy" text inside a picture to bypass its scanners.
The way you manage your workspace directly influences whether filters trust you or flag you.
Management: Using a professional email address rather than a free one (like @gmail.com or @yahoo.com) is a core requirement for business communication. In the "Workspace Settings" section, you should also ensure your domain is authenticated. This tells ISPs that Positive User has permission to send on your behalf.
Segmenting your database: To keep your reputation high, avoid sending every message to your entire list. Instead, go to the "Data" section and create contact segments and lists.
Problem: Low open rates are hurting your reputation.
Solution: Create a segment of contacts who have opened an email in the last 90 days and target them specifically.
Data Structure: Your deliverability is tied to the health of your contact list. If your data includes typos or nonexistent addresses, filters will flag you as a "lazy" sender. Regularly cleaning your list in the “Contacts” section helps maintain a high-quality relationship between your data and the ISPs.
Personalizing campaigns: Personalization makes your emails more relevant, which encourages engagement. When contacts regularly open and click your emails, it signals to filters that your content is wanted. You can use dynamic content to tailor messages to specific contact properties.
Campaigns
Sending consistently: Avoid sending 10 emails in one day and then nothing for a month. Create a steady schedule in the "Campaigns" section to show ISPs that you are a reliable sender.
Avoiding attachments: Instead of attaching a PDF, upload it to your "Media Library" and include a link in your message.
Filters
Identifying unengaged contacts: Use filters to find contacts who have not interacted with your brand in over six months. You can then move these to some “Snooze” list or remove them to protect your deliverability.
If you are using a new dedicated IP address, you must "warm it up" gradually. ISPs are suspicious of high volumes of mail coming from an unknown IP. Start by sending small batches of emails to your most engaged contacts and slowly increase the volume over several weeks to build a positive reputation.
