3 Things All Small Business Owners Need to Know to Avoid Landing in Spam Folders

So you’ve started a new business and now you want to go shooting off a million emails to folks to get things running.
*grabs a bag and opens it up to catch all the money coming in*

We’re here to tell you to slllooooowwwww your role before your reputation and business get hurt. Learn from our mistakes 🫠

Good intentions. Bad outcome.

We were eager to get things going when we opened our virtual doors in the Winter of 2024. With Jenny having run a successful photography and graphic design business for over 14 years and Erica’s experience running high-impact marketing teams (with a side of freelancer work) for over 10 years – we were feeling confident. #Isn’tOurFirstRodeo

✔ Get our business emails set up

✔ Set up our CRM

✔ Import all of our joined contacts

✔ Create high-value, original content to nurture our contacts monthly

✔ Feel proud of ourselves

And really, we did the right thing. Getting a nurture system set up and running is an important part of any marketing strategy – but there were some “small” things that we didn’t consider, which came back to bite us in the ass later on. 

Below are three things that, if we had known before, wouldn’t have caused all of our emails to get stuck in our prospects’ spam folders. Costing us potential revenue, our reputation, and a lot of “WTF?!” text messages sent between the two of us as we ran around like a bunch of coked-up lunatics trying to figure this all out. 

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1. New Email – Who Dis?

Having a business email is super important when marketing your business (hello@insertbusinessnamehere.com). Sure, sending a few emails from a @gmail.com address won’t kill you, but once you start sending en masse, you gotta dress for success. 

The only thing about a new email is, well…it’s new. In the eyes of the Google lords, no one knows this email, meaning you aren’t in a relationship with anyone yet. #StrangerDanger

Shooting off newsletters to 5k+ people off the couch makes it look as if you’re spamming people – even if you’re not. You have to warm up your email instead of sprinting to 4th base. 

Warming up your email is the process of gradually establishing a positive sender reputation for a new inactive email address. If you don’t do this, you run the risk of landing in your recipient's spam folder rather than in their inbox, where you should be. 

HERE IS HOW YOU WARM UP AN EMAIL ADDRESS:

1. Gradually increase your email volume

• Pssst this means don’t send 5k emails on day one Erica ☠️
  The warm-up process involves starting with a small number of emails at first, and then gradually increasing your send volume over time. This helps build trust with email service providers (ESPs) and reduces the likelihood of your emails being marked as spam. #whoopsie
  

2. Build your sender reputation

• A new email account has no reputation – which is essential for successful email delivery. By warming up your email, you improve your sender reputation, making your messages more likely to be delivered to recipients' inboxes.
  

3. Engagement metrics

• During the warm-up period, it's essential to monitor your engagement metrics, such as open rates and response rates. The higher your engagement, the more it signals to ESPs that your emails are valuable and should be delivered to inboxes.
  

4. Duration (aka total cook time)

• The warm-up process can take anywhere from 8 to 12 weeks, depending on the volume of emails sent and the level of engagement received. This gradual approach allows ESPs to recognize the email account as legitimate.
  

5. Avoid spam triggers

• Sending a large volume of emails immediately can trigger spam filters. The warm-up process helps avoid this by establishing a consistent sending pattern that ESPs recognize as normal behavior.

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2. Authenticate your email with DKIM and SPF

First – what the hell does that even mean? 

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), SPF (Sender Policy Framework), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) are essential email authentication technologies that help verify the legitimacy of email messages, protecting folks against spoofing and phishing attacks.

The DKIM is an email authentication method that adds a cryptographic signature to the header of an email. This signature allows the recipient's email server to verify that the email was sent by an authorized server and that the message has not been altered in transit. In order to authenticate DKIM, follow these steps below:

1. Generate a public-private key pair.

2. Publish the public key in your domain's DNS records as a DKIM TXT record.

3. Configure your email server to sign outgoing emails with the private key.

The SPF is another email authentication protocol that allows domain owners to specify which IP addresses are authorized to send emails on behalf of their domain. In order to authenticate SPF, follow these steps below:

1. Create an SPF record in your domain's DNS settings. This record should include all IP addresses authorized to send emails on behalf of your domain.

2. Ensure the SPF record is correctly formatted and includes all necessary IP addresses.

DMARC is an email authentication protocol designed to give domain owners a way to protect their domain from unauthorized use, commonly known as email spoofing. It builds off of DKIM and SPF to help ensure that the emails sent from a domain are #legit.

1. Identify all legitimate email senders associated with your domain, including email service providers and third-party services.

2. Then, create a DMARC record by logging into your domain’s DNS (Domain Name System) management console and adding a new TXT (Text) record.

Or really, just watch this video for step-by-step instructions on how to do all of this. YouTube is king when it comes to learning things you wish you never had to – like authenticating your email or learning how to change a flat tire.

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3. Protect your reputation like it’s an original, mint condition “Heroes” album signed by the man himself #RIPBowie👑

Your ability to connect with your prospects lives and dies by your reputation. Hurting this reputation can cost you — just like it has with us. From your follow-ups to your inquiries, it will be as if you never reached out to them in the first place, and your business will start to hurt like your head the day after Woodstock. 

Here are some things that you need to do to stay within the good graces of our “lord and savior,” Google:

1. Authenticate!

• Not authenticating protocols like SPF, DKIM, or DMARC or having invalid or missing reverse DNS records is no bueno. 

2. Don’t buy your leads

• Even if you feel like it’s the only way to get ahead (especially as a small business), just say you did and don’t do it. Growing your lists organically through opt-in methods is the only way to keep your reputation. Methods include an email capture form on your website or an opt-in CTA in the footer of your email signature.

3. Send to active emails

• Trying to send an email to an invalid address causes your email to “bounce” back. The higher your bounce rate is, the more it looks like you don’t know who you are sending to. Clean your lists folks!

4. Avoid spam complaints

• The more people mark your email as spam or if you don’t provide an easy, one-click option to opt out of your emails, the quicker you’ll land in that spam box. 

5. A+ engagement metrics

• Ensure you're maximizing your open rates, click-through rates, and replay rates. This becomes much easier when you're emailing people who have opted in to hear from you and consistently providing them with relevant content.

6. Send consistently

• Inconsistent sending patterns like sudden spikes in email volume or frequency look fishy and smell like spam. 

7. Be a human

• We all know what spam content looks like #Bots. Make sure your content doesn’t have excessive capitalization, misleading subject lines, too many images, or use of keywords commonly associated with spam. 

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Small business is hard – but we’re in it with you

I wish we didn’t have to learn the hard way, but here we are. All we can do is be vulnerable and share our learnings in the hope that you don’t have to stumble down the same path as we have. In all reality, it seems like avoiding landing in someone’s spam inbox should be pretty simple, but it can, unfortunately, be a lot easier than you think.

Not having the bandwidth to monitor your engagement metrics, not being a tech-minded person with no idea that you had to authenticate your email, and being unaware that you had to warm up your email is easy to do when you’re wearing all the hats at once. And it’s scary – because getting an email back from a prospect saying, “why are you ignoring me?” feels like shit. Especially when you know you responded ecstatically 30 seconds after you received their inquiry. 

If you have no idea how your email is performing, you can test it out for free with tools like MailReach or Warmy. And if you find out that you’re email has gone to 💩, come cry with us over at Fan Club Brands… that is, if you can get through to us 😭🤣

God speed you brave, well-intentioned businesses out there!