You’ll Need Help Keeping Your Emails Out of Gmail Spam Folders
Quick Answer
Reaching the Gmail primary tab is hard for any bulk sender, and authentication is the lever you control. A Twilio study tracking 30 days of email from US presidential campaigns to a Gmail account found only 3.8% landed in the primary tab, 21.3% went to spam, and the remaining 74.8% landed in promotions. Fewer than 50% of campaigns passed authentication; 42% had a missing or failing DMARC record, and 9% of those publishing DKIM had a failing DKIM record. Three protocols decide whether a sender lands in the inbox: SPF (lists allowed sending IPs), DKIM (signs messages so receivers can verify integrity), and DMARC (tells receivers what to do on failure and reports back). An outbound SMTP service that signs and authenticates mail for you and manages IP reputation removes the technical barrier that drops most senders into spam.
A lot of people have a Gmail account, which means marketers send a lot of emails to Gmail accounts. It sure would be nice if most or all of those emails could avoid the spam folder. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t see it that way.
According to a new report from Twilio, How Political Campaigns Can Ensure Their Email Messages Hit Home, only 3.8% of email messages from Presidential candidates made it into the primary tab of the Gmail account. What’s worse, is that 21.3% of emails ended up in the spam folder while the remaining 74.8% ended up in promotions.
To gather the data for their research, the folks at Twilio “subscribed to every single Democratic candidate that had entered the race” back in July 2019. Then they “tracked all communications to the single Gmail address we enrolled for a period of 30 days.”
Now, to be fair, these political campaigns do not always follow best practices when it comes to sending promotional emails, which definitely has an impact on deliverability. But, that’s not the real culprit as to why their email delivery rates to Gmail are so low.
There are three email authentication technologies which dramatically improve an email’s chances of avoiding the dreaded spam folder. They are Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) and Domain Messaging Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC). While the political campaigns weren’t entirely negligent in this area, they also weren’t as good as they need to be to improve delivery rates.
According to the report, “fewer than 50% of the campaigns employed and passed email authentication checks. 42% of the campaigns had either a missing DMARC record or were failing a DMARC check.”
And while 100% of campaigns published a DKIM record, “9%, had a DKIM record that failed verification.”
What email marketers in the private sector have learned, is that sending authenticated emails has a positive effect on avoiding spam folders. There’s simply no reason to send unauthenticated emails when you care about deliverability. And it’s not like these technologies add any real cost to your email.
Outbound SMTP by DuoCircle, ensures deliverability of your high volume emails by sending emails authenticated with SPF, DKIM and DMARC. With IP reputation management in place and servers worldwide, Outbound SMTP ensures your messages hit the inbox every time, even if you’re not running for President.
General Manager
General Manager at DuoCircle. Product strategy and commercial lead across the email security portfolio.
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