How To Get Your Emails Out Of The Bermuda Triangle

Let’s talk about every business’ worst nightmare – landing in the spam folder.

Whether you’re a business that emails your audience frequently, you send 1:1 cold emails individually, or you’re about to embark on email outreach for your business — this is a must-read.

Getting emails out of your leads’ spam folders is a serious problem that not many people know how to properly come back from. Once your emails land here, it’s a multi-month helluva process of getting your emails out of the Bermuda Triangle – most don’t come back, but you can if you patiently & proactively take these steps below.

(If you don’t know what the Bermuda Triangle is, this is one of my favorite urban legends from when I was a kid.)

Get your reputation back.

Whether your open rates are <20% or you’re being told that your emails frequently land in people’s spam folders — the sooner you begin the process of getting your reputation back, the quicker you’ll see results. This is a multi-month process that won’t produce results overnight, so you need to start early.

The first thing I recommend doing is to prune your list as much as possible. Go into your email list and remove the emails that are bouncing — they’re dead weight that’s dragging down your open rates.
If this feels relevant, remove the emails that haven’t opened your emails in 6+ months. This is a decision that’s subject to each individual — I personally will delete people off my list if I don’t see opens in 6+ months, but if you don’t feel comfortable deleting emails right off the bat, follow my next step about putting a pruning drip in place.
Once this Phase 1 clean up is done, make a decision about how to separate your audience.
Getting your email’s reputation back is about showing Gmail and all the other email gods that your emails have high open rates and that people don’t think you’re a spammer. If you have a weekly email and about 20% are opening it consistently, send your weekly email to only that 20% segment for a few weeks so that you can boost your open rates into the 80%+ range. Separate out those who aren’t opening your emails and put them into a separate pruning drip (so this means those who aren’t opening your emails are not going to get your weekly emails for a little bit). More on that in the pruning drip section.

Some one-off tips to get your reputation back:

Avoid using spam trigger words in your subject lines. This link has a pretty comprehensive list.
Spend a lot of time on your subject line. Think about the desirability of your subject line in an inbox with 500 emails. If your subject line is bland, no one’s going to read all the juicy content inside.
There’s a reason why you see my name as the sender of this email and not Ascent Strategy — email platforms favor emails from actual people. If this is an option for you, make your name known but take the time to ease your audience into this if they’ve been seeing your brand name in your inbox for a while (because if they see your name out of the blue and don’t know who you are, that’ll trigger people saying you’re spam too). This isn’t an option for everyone though, so if you're using your brand name, do the marketing work so that your audience loves hearing the name of your brand.
Don’t ever buy email lists, or add people without their consent (even friends, always ask first). This is bad behavior in the email world that lands you in people’s spam folders due to unsubscribes and categorizing your emails as spam.

Put a pruning drip in place.

There are two versions of a pruning drip.

Version 1 is getting the email zombies on your list who aren’t opening your emails to come back to life. I recommend creating a series of 4-5 emails where the first 2-3 emails focus on delivering a ton of value and the last 2 emails lets your audience know that you’re about to remove them from your list.

The first 2-3 emails should focus on nurturing your audience and getting them to open and click on links in your emails. They should deliver a lot of valuable information they’re interested in hearing so that you provoke a reaction. If you don’t want to reinvent the wheel, you can use your most opened emails from the past and resend it.

The last 2 emails should function as last chance emails letting your audience know that you’ve been noticing that they haven’t been opening your emails and that you’ll automatically remove them from your list unless they click on a link in the email to let you know that they want to stay on. The 1st email should still have valuable content in it with the last chance statement at the end, and the 2nd and final email should be giving people a last chance to stay on your list.

Make sure to space out all these emails so that they’re sent about 2 weeks from each other, this gives your audience maximum time to stay on your list.

Throughout this drip, you should place triggers that automatically take people off this pruning drip if they open and interact with your emails. If they stay on through the full 4-5 emails and don’t take any action, they should be automatically deleted from your list now (set up triggers to do this for you). You’ve given them enough chances to interact with you and either their email inbox is not checked, they don’t want to hear from you, or you’re landing in their spam folder.
Version 2 is running an automated pruning drip. Set this and forget it so that you don’t have to think through this process again and that your list is getting automatically pruned every month to keep you out of the email blacklist. Follow the steps above and automate the 4-5 emails to run indefinitely with the right trigger tagging mechanisms in place.

Let this run indefinitely.

I’m not going to sugarcoat this for you, this process will take 2-3 months if you have a list <2K and longer the bigger your list is. This is a long and diligent process and there are NO overnight solutions to get your emails out of spam. Sorry — I’ve looked into this for years and there just isn’t.

Once you’ve taken these steps, automate it and have your list automatically prune out non-openers so that you don’t fall into being blacklisted again. The recovery path is so much more of a headache than doing things right from the beginning, so take these steps and do it right this time!

After doing all of this, if all else fails, take a hard look at your emails. People are bombarded with emails everyday and if your audience isn’t opening them, it’s likely that they just don’t think your emails are that interesting. I wrote about how to make your emails more interesting here.

For more wisdom that turns your startup chase into a victory lap, get my Friday emails, (lovingly called The Crux) in your inbox.

Sophia SunwooJuly 14, 2022