Why did my email land in spam?

Is there anything I can do to avoid it next time?

We get asked these questions a lot here at Flodesk, so rest assured that it’s not just happening to you.

Email going to spam is a common issue anytime you move to any new email marketing platform, whether you’re moving from ConvertKit to Flodesk or MailChimp to Mad Mimi. Happily, there are steps you can take to get your emails out of spam and into your subscribers’ inboxes. We created the following guide to show you how.

Before we show you how to get your emails out of spam through a process called whitelisting, it’s helpful to understand why emails end up in spam in the first place.

As diverse and amazing as your email subscribers are, so are the email service providers they use.

Need proof?

Go to your Audience > Subscribers dashboard to see for yourself. Scroll through the list and you’ll probably see a rainbow of email accounts, including gmail.com, outlook.com and yahoo.com addresses, to name a few. You’ll even find email addresses from custom domains.

All of these email service platforms work slightly differently. But their main goal is the same: to provide their users with the best email experience, including protecting their accounts from harm and filtering out certain emails as spam.

But why would they filter out my email as spam now?

I’ve been sending emails to my subscribers for months—or even years—without any problems.

Well, actually, that’s the exact reason why they do it.

If you’ve been emailing your list from another email marketing platform for a while—think MailChimp, ActiveCampaign—then the spam filters have learned to let your emails through as safe. They learned this based on the positive actions your subscribers took in the past. Like opening and clicking links in your emails.

But when you switched over to Flodesk, now your emails are coming via Flodesk’s servers. This is something new and unexpected. Your subscriber’s email provider may wonder if it's a hack. And to protect their subscriber's inbox, they may deliver the message to the junk folder.

You see, the spam filters need to learn again to let your emails through as safe. And that goes for all email marketing platforms, not only when you switch to Flodesk. You can help spam filters learn faster by asking your subscribers to whitelist your email address or domain.

When an email address or domain gets whitelisted, it means that they’re marked as a safe sender so their emails aren’t automatically marked as spam. The process to whitelist an email address or domain varies by provider but is super easy to do. Let’s take a look at how to do it in Gmail.

Follow the steps below to whitelist a specific email address or domain in Gmail so these emails don’t go to Spam.

This is a strong signal to email providers—i.e., Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo—that your recipients see you as a safe source. And they’ll generally deliver your emails to their clients’ inboxes—unless other spam triggers are detected.

If you’re just getting started on Flodesk, you may want to copy and paste the whitelist instructions above and share them with your list to ensure they get your emails. Or you can include it in one of your first few welcome sequence emails as a best practice for your subscribers.
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If you switch email marketing providers, it's not uncommon that some of your emails land in spam in the beginning. Your recipients' email servers need to learn that your emails are still safe—though they are being sent via a new marketing platform like Flodesk.

If you ask your subscribers to add your email address to their Contacts list or Address book—this is called whitelisting—that can ensure that the spam filters let your email through as safe the next time you email them. Your deliverability (that is, the number of emails that land in subscribers’ inboxes) should be back to normal within a few weeks of regular emailing.
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