Preventing your campaigns from being marked as spam
To prevent your campaigns from bouncing, you need to understand the factors that determine whether your newsletter is marked as spam by the recipient's system.
If you maintain a clean list with subscribers who have opted-in to receive your newsletter, you do not usually have to worry about your email marketing efforts being marked as spam. There are two factors that determine whether your campaigns end up in the spam folders of your recipient's email service, sender reputation and message content.
Sender reputation
A recipient's email client (for example, Gmail or Outlook) reviews the sender address of your campaign before deciding whether to accept or reject the email message. Therefore, you must set up SPF and DKIM frameworks and verify DMARC. These frameworks boost your sending reputation by letting the recipient's email client know that you are sending your campaigns using Moosend servers.
Message content
When your recipient's email client reviews your newsletter, it analyzes the content to determine where your messages should be delivered. To ensure your newsletter lands in the inbox rather than the spam folder, make sure your content aligns with what your subscribers expect. Additionally, you can use an external content analyzer to test the newsletter's content or for a list of spam words to avoid in your campaign, check out our blog post here.
Delivery failure
If your newsletter cannot be delivered, it is considered as spam. A delivery failure is called a bounce. There are two kinds of bounces: a soft bounce and a hard bounce.
Soft bounces
A soft bounce indicates that the email address of the campaign's recipient is valid but a temporary delivery issue prevented the campaign from actually being delivered. Our platform will try to resend the email that did not manage to reach the recipient's inbox four additional times before a hard bounce occurs. The most common reasons for a soft bounce to occur are:
The recipient has set an auto-reply mechanism.
The email message you are trying to send is too large.
The recipient's mail server is currently down or offline.
Hard bounces
Hard bounce indicates a permanent reason why an email message cannot be delivered to a specific subscriber's email address. Hard bounced email addresses are automatically removed from your email list and transferred to the Bounced status category. The most common reasons why a hard bounce might occur are:
The recipient's mailbox is full and cannot receive more email messages.
The recipient misspelled their email address while subscribing.
The recipient has deleted or changed their email address, or provided you with a false address.
The recipient's mail server has blocked your server.
Reducing bounce rates
High bounce rates affect your sender reputation and prevent you from achieving higher email delivery rates. You can reduce the number of bounces by implementing some key email deliverability best practices:
Keep your mailing list clean - clean your mailing list regularly and delete non-responders and invalid addresses.
Use double opt-in - Have users confirm their email address to avoid having invalid recipients.
Monitor email message delivery - Pay close attention to bounce rates as well as response rates to avoid potential damage before it happens.