Why does my newsletter end up in the spam folder?

If you have carefully put together a newsletter, it is of course a shame if you notice it ending up in a spam folder. We do our very best to deliver all emails in the inbox, and that almost always goes right, but unfortunately not always.

The underlying reason for this is that there is an incredible amount of spam being sent in the world: over 60% of all sent emails are spam emails. To prevent your inbox from flowing over with this, there are spam filters active everywhere. Unfortunately, these filters occasionally mark legitimate emails as spam.

One of the most important factors that determine if a newsletter ends up in the spam folder is the sender's reputation. For senders with a high volume (many emails) and low spam, the recipients' confidence builds, and a larger number of emails ends up in the inbox. We have worked hard on our sender reputation for years (mostly by preventing spam getting sent through our system), and for this reason our reputation is excellent.

Additionally, the email must be in order technically; we always manage this.

Most important: authenticate your domain

If you have not yet done this, the most important step you can take to increase the deliverability of your newsletters is authenticating your domain(s).

Tabs in Gmail

Gmail has different tabs; your newsletter might end up under Promotions. That is different from a spam folder.

Additional measures

You can also take a number of measures yourself: for example, make sure you have a good subscriber list (that are receptive to your newsletters), good content and subject line, and the right frequency of newsletters.

You can also advise your subscribers in your newsletters to add your sender address to their address book. A subscriber will then be certain that your newsletter will not get stuck in a spam filter. (By using our drag & drop editor, this tip is added to the footer of your newsletter by default.)

You can find more tips to prevent your newsletters from being marked as spam on our website.

Filters

Furthermore, some recipients are especially discerning, with Hotmail/Outlook.com as the main examples. Despite having great scores, a (tiny) percentage of emails does not end up in the inbox.

In the end, you cannot do much other than accept that a few newsletters will end up in the spam folder.