If your marketing plan involves sending emails to existing and potential customers, you will want those emails to get through of course. Well, this is easier said than done. You can have the best design and writing skills in the world but that won't help if your email never reaches its intended destination. Here are some of the most common reasons that your emails might be flagged as junk mail never get delivered.

 

1. Junk Mail is Calculated by using a Spam Score: Email is determined to be spam by a spam filter. Each mail server will be configured to have a different threshold and a spam score will be determined for each email. There are many attributes of an email that will be looked at by the filter such as content, length, percentage of text, use of images, number of recipients, headers etc. If the mail’s score exceeds a certain threshold the mail is blocked and lands in the spam folder.
2. Spam filters are not perfect. There is a never ending battle between the spam filter technologies and the level of complexity of the spammers. The end result is that spam settings are usually set to be more restrictive and legitimate emails wind up being blocked.
3. Bounced Mail: There are various reasons why an email may get bounced. There are actually two kinds of email bounces, hard and soft. A hard bounce happens when the email address recipient is no longer active. This may happen when an account gets deleted, or if the email of file is not a legitimate email. A soft bounce is when there is a temporary technical problem with delivering the email. This can happen for example when the recipient email system is offline.

Considerable expense of time and money are invested in maintaining and accumulating a mailing list. Any bounced email will return a server message, however when an email is caught by a spam filter you may never receive any warning or notification at all. It is important to test your email marketing deliverability before any major bulk email campaign is launched.