How to stop your emails from going to spam in Gmail

Here’s a harsh truth:

Your email outreach won’t actually reach your prospect if you don’t land in their inbox.

Getting through to their primary folder is especially hard for Gmail inboxes.

Google’s rules on what a legitimate email looks like are getting stricter constantly.

Here are some tips to help prevent your emails going to spam in Gmail.

1. Warm up your email ♨️

If your sender reputation is poor or non-existent, your emails will land in spam.

A new domain, for example, will have no sender reputation to speak of.

If you use a new domain to send out many daily emails, most will not reach your audience’s inbox.

To build up and monitor your sender reputation, use an email deliverability tool like lemwarm.

One of lemwarm’s features is email warm-up, which gradually increases your sending volume and frequency so that you can build up your sender reputation.

2. Audit your sender reputation 🔍

To find out whether your sender reputation is actually a problem and a potential cause of your emails landing in the Gmail spam folder, you can audit your sender reputation.

lemwarm keeps track of your deliverability score, whether your domain is on any blacklist, and gives detailed reports on where your warm-up emails are landing.

Instead of a one-time sender reputation audit, lemwarm keeps monitoring your reputation and lets you know when problems arise.

3. Take care of your technical setup ⚠️

Cold email beginners often overlook the technical setup.

They often have no idea why their emails are not going to the inbox.

At the core of the technical setup is domain authentication. Your sending domain can be authenticated by adding a few DNS records to your domain’s DNS settings.

These DNS records are:

• SPF records
• DKIM records
• DMARC records

Make sure you have these records properly configured.

Additionally, when using an email automation tool, make sure you use a custom tracking domain.

If not, your emails will contain the tool’s tracking domain, which is being used by many of its customers, including spammers. This could tarnish your sender reputation.

4. Write better emails! 🖊️

The contents of your emails can trigger spam filters.

It’s important to avoid spam words that could send your emails directly to the spam folder!

Additionally, you must heavily personalize your emails so that they do not all look the same. Sending out hundreds of cookie-cutter emails per day could put your sender reputation in danger.

lemlist allows for advanced personalization so that your emails look like they were custom human-written emails.

When your emails improve, they will lead to increased engagement, which can improve your sender reputation and help you avoid the Gmail spam folder.

5. Add a clear unsubscribe link 🔗

Offering your prospects a straightforward way to opt out of your mailings is a mandatory requirement for cold email.

And the more visible and clickable the link is, the better.

Make it easier for uninterested prospects to click the unsubscribe link rather than the spam button.

Spam complaints are bad news for your sender reputation!

6. Check if you’re blacklisted 🧾

Being on a spam blacklist can affect your sender reputation and send your emails to spam.

lemwarm has blacklist monitoring, and if you’re on one it will let you know how to fix it.

7. Use better subject lines 📧

It needs no explanation that having spammy words in the subject line will give your email what it deserves: the spam folder.

But it’s not just that.

Good subject lines will make people open the email more, which is good for your sender reputation.

However, if your excellent subject line isn't relevant to the email's message, you might hurt your deliverability.

If recipients feel misled, they’re more likely to hit the spam button.

Key Takeaways 🔑

• Google is making it harder to reach the inbox of Gmail users
• You can usually fix the issue that causes your emails to land in the Gmail spam folder
• The most common reasons your emails land in spam are your sender reputation, lack of email warm-up, and the content of your emails