Introduction

Are your emails landing into your recipients’ Spam folder? There’s a way to avoid that!

By using a third-party email checker such as MailTester or Mailgenius, you can check the spam factor of your emails. 

This article considers MailTester to demonstrate spam score computation for email campaigns created in Vtiger CRM.

Checking your Spam Score using MailTester

 Follow these steps to find out your spam score:

Copying the test email address from MailTester

1. Log on to www.mail-tester.com.
2. Copy the email address shown by clicking the Copy icon.

• Note: Keep the MailTester web page open while performing these steps. Refreshing the web page will produce a new email address, and you must restart the process from Step 1.  

Creating a dummy contact in Vtiger with MailTester’s email address

3. Log in to your CRM account.
4. Click the Main Menu.
5. Go to Essentials.
6. Select Contacts.
7. Click +Add Contacts. 
8. Enter the First Name and Last Name (for example, Mail Tester) and paste the email address you copied from MailTester into the Primary Email field. 
9. Click Save.

 Sending your email campaign to MailTester’s email address

10. Click the Main Menu.
11. Go to Marketing.
12. Select Email Campaigns.
13. Open the email campaign that you want to send or create a new campaign.
14. Create a new marketing list with MailTester contact.
    1. Edit the Recipients section.
    2. Click Create New Marketing List.
    3. Enter the marketing list name.
    4. Choose Contacts under Add subscribers.
    5. Click +Add Conditions under All Conditions.
    6. Choose Last Name from the Select Field drop-down.
    7. Choose equals from the Select Condition drop-down.
    8. Enter ‘Tester’ in the textbox. 
       • This is to imply that the marketing list contains MailTester’s contact that we created earlier.
    9. Click Apply. 
    10. Enable both checkboxes at the bottom.
15. Click Done.

• Your campaign is now ready.

16. Click Send Now located on the top right.

After the campaign status changes to Completed, go back to mail-tester.com. 

Checking the spam score on mail-tester.com

17. Switch to the mail-tester.com tab.
18. Click Then check your score.

MailTester takes 14 seconds to calculate your spam score. I also shows other metrics at the bottom of the page, which can help you judge your email campaign’s effectiveness.

Now, let’s see how you can avoid your emails from landing in the spam folder.
 

Avoiding your Emails from Landing in Spam

Here are some tips on avoiding your emails from landing in the recipient’s spam folder.

• Ask permission before sending email: When you ask permission to send marketing emails, chances are less that they will be marked as spam. Also, it becomes highly likely that the recipients will open your emails because they have opted to receive them. 

In Vtiger CRM, you can obtain a double opt-in from your leads and contacts before you send them marketing emails. A double opt-in ensures that recipients have been granted permission to receive marketing emails from you.

• Use a familiar identity: Use a proper From Name and From Email so that people know who the email sender is. Use business email addresses instead of personal ones so that identifying the sender becomes easy for the recipient.

• Send relevant and valuable content: Content that is uninteresting or irrelevant to a recipient can also be marked as spam or sent to trash. Find out what your audience is interested in by sending out surveys or analyzing your email reports. Curate emails accordingly to stop them from landing in spam. Also, make sure your content is valuable to the recipients and provides them with useful information. 

• Declutter your marketing list: To make sure you are sending the right content to the right people, you can do two things -
  • Declutter your marketing list to remove uninterested recipients and recipients who have opted out.
  • Segment your marketing list to group recipients who are interested in the kind of content.

To learn about marketing lists in Vtiger CRM, click here.

• Balance your content: Email marketing is mainly used for promotions. But, too many promotional emails can drive your audience away. Strike a healthy balance between helpful, informative, and promotional content. Don’t just promote your products; let your audience know how they can be beneficial to them.

• Offer a simple opt-out process: If a recipients are not interested in your content, they might want to unsubscribe. Allowing them to do it can prevent them from marking your emails as spam. 

An unsubscribe link is automatically embedded at the bottom of all Vtiger email campaigns. By clicking the link, recipients can unsubscribe themselves from any marketing list they are a part of. 

Give the following article a read to improve your email campaigns using email authentication: Authenticate Emails with SPF and DKIM