Why Your Emails Are Going to Spam (And How to Fix It)
Why Your Emails Are Going to Spam
If a client has ever told you they never got your email, or your open rates have dropped steadily over the past few months without any obvious reason, the problem is almost certainly not your subject line. It’s not your send time, and it’s not that your list has stopped caring. It’s something technical sitting quietly in the background, and the good news is that you don’t have to become a technical person to fix it.
I see this with new clients regularly. They’ve been sending campaigns for months, sometimes years, and a significant portion of those emails have been landing in spam the entire time. They had no idea because their own sends look fine in their sent folder. The problem only becomes visible when you know where to look, and once you do, it’s almost always fixable.
Here’s what’s actually going on and what to do about it.
Why Emails Land In Spam
Email providers like Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail run every incoming email through a set of filters before deciding where it lands. Those filters are checking a few things: whether the content looks spammy, whether the sender has a history of low engagement, and whether the sending domain is properly authenticated.
The first two get most of the attention because they’re visible. People obsess over avoiding words like “free” or “guarantee” in subject lines, and they worry about their unsubscribe rate. Those things matter, but they’re rarely the root cause of a deliverability problem. Authentication almost always is.
The Authentication Issue
When you send an email from your business address, the receiving server wants to verify that it was sent by someone authorized to send on behalf of your domain. Three standards handle this: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
SPF (Sender Policy Framework) is a record in your domain’s DNS settings that lists which servers are allowed to send email on your behalf. If your email marketing platform isn’t listed there, some receiving servers will treat your emails with suspicion or reject them outright.
DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) adds a digital signature to every email you send, and the receiving server checks that signature against a public key stored in your DNS. If the signature doesn’t match or the key isn’t there, the email fails the check.
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) sits on top of SPF and DKIM. It’s basically a set of instructions that tells email providers what to do if something about your email looks suspicious. Without a DMARC record, you’re leaving that decision entirely up to the receiving server, and different servers make different choices.
Most small business owners set up their domain, connect their email marketing platform, and never touch the DNS settings again. That’s usually how authentication gets missed, and it can silently affect your deliverability for months before you notice something is wrong.
I had a client whose emails were landing in spam consistently and she had no idea why. We ran her domain through MXtoolbox and found her authentication was incomplete. When we dug deeper, we discovered something more serious: her email was being spoofed. Someone was sending emails pretending to be her, using her business name and domain to do it. Beyond the deliverability problem, that’s a real threat to your business reputation and your clients’ trust. We set up her DKIM, SPF, and DMARC properly, then tightened her DMARC policy from “none” to “quarantine,” which stopped the spoofing and locked down who could send on her behalf. Now we monitor her DMARC reports regularly to catch anything unusual early. Her emails land in the inbox every time.
How to Find Out If This Is Your Problem
A colleague of mine, Scott Hartley, offers a free email authentication check that runs all three records against your domain. Scott knows email deliverability inside out, and the tool he built reflects that. The results are clear enough that you don’t need a technical background to understand what they’re telling you.
The check will either confirm everything is set up correctly or immediately explain the deliverability problems you’ve been seeing. Either way, you’ll know where you stand.
What To Do If Something Is Broken
If the check comes back clean on all three records, authentication isn’t your issue and you can look elsewhere: list hygiene, engagement rates, or your email content itself.
If something is flagged, the fix usually involves adding or updating DNS records through whoever manages your domain, whether that’s GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare, or somewhere else. Your email marketing platform (Thryv, Kit, MailerLite. etc.) should have documentation showing exactly which records to add for their sending servers. Most platforms have a step-by-step guide in their help center, and the changes typically take effect within 24 to 48 hours.
The part that trips people up is the DNS settings and the terminology (TXT records, CNAME records, values and selectors). These settings themselves can look intimidating if you’ve never seen them before, which is why many business owners avoid touching them. If you get into the settings and it’s not clear what you’re looking at, this is worth a quick call with whoever manages your website or domain, or with us if you want a hand.
The Other Things Worth Checking
Authentication is the most common culprit, but a few other things can contribute to deliverability problems and are worth reviewing once your records are clean.
LIST HYGIENE If your list has a lot of addresses that haven’t opened an email in 12 months or more, they’re dragging down your engagement rate, and low engagement is one of the signals that flags a sender as low-quality. A re-engagement campaign sent to cold contacts before removing them from your active list is worth running at least once a year. Anyone who doesn’t open or click over the course of that campaign gets suppressed, not deleted, and your list gets healthier.
YOUR SENDING CADENCE Gmail and Yahoo have tightened their engagement rules, and your sender reputation depends on people actually opening and clicking your emails. If you disappear for two months and then blast your list, inbox providers notice the sudden activity from a cold sender and get suspicious. A weekly cadence keeps you visible, keeps your list warm, and keeps your reputation healthy.
I hear from coaches all the time that they don’t want to email too much because they’re worried about annoying people. Here’s what actually happens when you email more consistently: you lose some subscribers, and that’s fine. The people who stay are the ones who want to hear from you. Your list gets smaller and more engaged, and an engaged list is worth ten times a large, cold one.
YOUR SENDING REPUTATION If you’ve had a high complaint rate (people hitting “mark as spam” rather than unsubscribing), a history of sending to invalid addresses, or a sudden spike in send volume, your reputation takes a hit that can take weeks to recover. Consistent, moderate sending with a clean list builds reputation. Irregular sending to an old list damages it.
YOUR FROM ADDRESS Sending from a free email address (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo) through a paid email marketing platform creates an authentication conflict that most platforms now flag or block entirely. Your from address should match your business domain, and your domain needs the authentication records above to back it up.
If Your Open Rates Are Still Low After Fixing All Of This
Authentication and list hygiene account for the majority of deliverability problems, but they don’t account for all of them. If you’ve worked through everything above and your open rates are still lower than you’d expect, the next step is a proper email audit that looks at your sending history, your list segments, your content, and your platform settings together.
That’s something we do as part of our email strategy work, and it usually surfaces something the individual checks miss. Most of our clients are surprised by how straightforward the fix turns out to be once someone who knows what they’re looking at reviews everything together. If you want to talk through what you’re seeing, the free Power Up Call is a good place to start. There’s a real peace of mind that comes from hitting send and knowing your email is going to arrive, and that’s what we’re working toward.