Inbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo decide whether your email lands in the inbox or in spam. They judge you on five things: your content and links, engagement, your send-from address, authentication, and your IP address. Let's go through them.
Start with what's in the email. Some topics, like losing weight or making money, get flagged a lot. If that's your business, keep those claims on your website, not in your emails.
Then follow a few simple rules. Hyperlink your text or use buttons instead of pasting raw URLs, and don't repeat the same link more than twice. Skip URL shorteners and swipe copy. Write your own. Keep your formatting consistent, without jumping between bold, underline and plain text. Aim for about 20 percent images and 80 percent text, and write at least 500 characters, but no more than five or six paragraphs. In subject lines and preheaders, go easy on spammy words. Even "call now" or "amazing" can count against you.
Every designed email needs a plain text version that matches it. In Advanced Mail, open Settings, go to Plain text email, and turn on Sync plain text on publish. In Raw HTML, click Copy From HTML.
Before you send, click Send test email in the toolbar and check it in your own inbox. Merge fields won't fill in on a test, because it isn't tied to a contact.
Then check the spam score at the bottom of the Settings tab. 2.9 or lower is good, 3 to 4.9 is medium, and at 5 or higher you can't save or send. Click the score to see what's raising it. Spam scores are available in Advanced Mail and Raw HTML.
Links have reputations too. If spammers have used a URL, your email can get flagged just for linking to it. So don't promote shared domains, like bit.ly or Ontraport's own domains. When you set up your custom domain, include click tracking, so your tracked links show your own domain.
Engagement is the big one. Providers watch whether people open, read and click your emails, and it's the most common reason senders end up in spam. So send great content only to people who asked for it, and never buy, rent or borrow a list. As you saw in "How to not be a spammer," permission comes first, and complaints and bounces need to stay low.
If your open rates are low, use groups to split your contacts by last activity. Keep sending as usual to people active in the last 30 days. Send to people active 31 to 90 days ago only every third mailing, about two hours after the first group. Put anyone inactive for more than 90 days into a re-engagement automation, then stop emailing the ones who don't respond. Ontraport has free prebuilt list-cleaning automations you can download to help. Results can show up in as little as two weeks.
Help people engage, too. Ask them to reply, and put allowlisting instructions in your welcome email. And remember, providers judge all your email together, so weak engagement on marketing emails hurts your receipts and other transactional email too.
Some providers flag emails with open-tracking pixels. You choose which emails get tracked under Administration, then Email, then Email tracking. Ontraport recommends Only track bulk email opens.
Next, who the email is from. Your from name is what people see next to your subject line. Include your company name, keep it consistent, and avoid special characters. A first name on its own can look suspicious to providers like Gmail.
To set your from name and reply-to address, click the profile icon, go to Manage Users, and select your user. Make the reply-to an inbox you actually check. Replies build relationships and make it more likely people allowlist you.
You can't send from a free address, like Gmail. If you signed up with one, Ontraport gives you an ontramail.com address, which is a shared domain. Add a from address on your own domain instead. Click the profile icon, go to Administration, then Email, then Email 'From' Address Setup, and click Add email. Enter the part before the @, choose your custom domain, and confirm the address from the email Ontraport sends it.
Your own custom domain gives you your own reputation, separate from other Ontraport senders. And Google and Yahoo now require domains that send more than a few thousand emails a day to have SPF, DKIM and DMARC records. Set up your domain under Administration, in Custom Domains. Click New custom domain, choose an option that includes sending email and click tracking, and follow the Entri pop-up to log in to your domain provider. If you set up your domain before January 22, 2024, edit it and click Configure to update its settings. Custom domains are available on paid accounts.
If you send tens of thousands of emails a month, warm up your reputation. Ontraport's postmaster team can help.
Last, and least important for most people: your IP address. Ontraport monitors its shared IPs, and they're fine for most senders. A private IP is only worth considering if you send consistently, at least 30,000 emails a month, and only after you've handled the other four. Ask Support about it.
If you've worked through all five and you're still having trouble, email Ontraport's postmaster team at postmaster@ontraport.com.
So: write clean emails, send them to people who want them, send from your own authenticated domain, and leave the IP for last. That wraps up Messages. Next up, we start the Automations section with an overview of how automations work.