Introduction

Email is a great way to stay in touch with your customers and prospects, but it isn’t always a great way to get responses. That’s why you might want to consider keeping your email surveys out of the spam folder—so they don’t end up lost in your inbox.

If you’re not sure how email spam filters work, let’s take a look at what they are and how they can help you keep your surveys from going missing.

What Are Email Spam Folders?

An email spam folder is a special folder in your email account that is used by email servers to store messages that haven’t been delivered to recipients’ inboxes. These are typically used by ISPs to store messages that haven’t been read by recipients or have been flagged as spam.

So, an email spam folder is a part of your email server that you can use to automatically remove unwanted messages. When you send an email to someone, it can be sent to one or more folders. The recipient’s email program reads the message and determines what kind of message it is—text (for example, an invitation), graphics (for example, an advertisement), or HTML (a web page). 

If the recipient’s email program has a spam filter enabled, it will automatically move any email that matches its particular criteria into a spam folder.

The sender’s email program then receives the same message with a subject line indicating that it has been placed in a spam folder. The sender’s email program then sends out another message with the same subject line and content but with a different address from which it was sent.

How Do Email Spam Filters Work

Email spam filters are a way for your email server to determine whether or not a message is legitimate. They’re also the reason why you can’t send emails from a domain that’s not registered with your email service provider.

Email filters scan your incoming messages for specific words or phrases and then decide whether or not those words/phrases match what’s in their database of “spam words.” If it does, the message will be stored in your spam folder until it’s manually removed from there.

Email spam filters are part of the process of keeping your email inbox clean and safe from unwanted messages, but they can also be used to help protect your business. If you’re sending surveys to customers, it’s important to keep them out of the spam folder so they don’t end up in anyone else’s inbox or their junk folder.

Message Health Scores

If you’re using an email service provider, they’ll likely use something called a “message health score” on each message sent through their system and this determines how likely it is that the message will end up in your spam folder. Message health scores are part of most modern email servers and help determine whether an individual email is spam or not. 

They work by examining the headers in an email before they are opened by their recipient and determining if those headers indicate that this particular person has sent those types of messages before.

Email Deliverability

When you’re sending out surveys, the first thing you should do is make sure that your recipients are actually receiving your email. Do this by testing with a few people and using the most popular email service provider for your business.

After that, make sure you are using a valid email address with your company’s domain name. If all of these steps have been taken and you’re still getting spamming emails from customers, there are a few things you can do to get them back and we will discuss these tips soon.

Implications of Having Your Survey End Up In A Spam Folder

The implication of having your survey in the spam folder is that no one will see it. And even if they do open it, they’ll most likely delete it without ever opening your survey or clicking through to see what you asked them. 

This means you’ll lose all opportunities to get feedback on your survey questions, which means no chance of getting any data at all.

Tips For Keeping Your Surveys Out of the Spam Folder

1. Avoid High Image-To-Text Ratios: Most spam filters will flag high image-to-text ratios as being suspicious, so it’s best to avoid this type of ratio altogether. When designing your surveys, keep in mind that they need to be readable on mobile devices as well as desktops and laptops. If you have too much text or images on every page of your survey, people won’t be able to read it all because they’re too busy trying to decipher what all those pictures are supposed to mean. Keep things simple by using large fonts and keeping things simple with just one image per page (unless there’s a lot of text).

2. Avoid Offensive Words: Make sure your survey is not offensive or abusive in any way before sending it out as offensive words can be flagged and can lead your email straight to the spam folder. Also, they could lead to negative consequences for your company in the future. You want to make sure that your survey doesn’t violate any laws or regulations. 

3. Avoid Emailing All Your Customers At One Time: Avoid sending surveys to everyone in your database at once. The more you send, the more likely you are to end up with a big batch of spam complaints and suspension. This may also increase your chances of getting suspended by email providers for sending too many emails in a short amount of time. It’s better to split up your email list into sections and send them out one at a time so each person gets an individual email rather than flooding their inbox with hundreds of messages at once.

4. Avoid Misspellings, Styling Mistakes: Don’t use spelling or style mistakes like “is” instead of “are,” or “should” instead of “will.” Those kinds of things are very easy for spammers to misspell and turn into their own versions of your company name and content. Also, you want people reading through the content of your emails to feel confident that they’re coming from someone legitimate; if they don’t understand what you’re saying, then they may feel less comfortable sharing their personal information on your survey.

5. Avoid Using Spam Trigger Words: These are words that automatically trigger an email from this sender (for example: “free”). Other words include: “get,” “money,” “free trial,” and “sale.” These are all phrases that can be used to trigger a spam filter and get caught in your spam folder. The best way to avoid getting caught by a spam filter is to make sure you’re not using any of these phrases in your subject line or body text.

6. Avoid Using All-Caps in your Email Subject Line: Using all caps in your email subject line or using an exclamation mark can trigger spam filters, too. It is best to steer clear so that your email is sent across to your readers and not forgotten in the spam folder.

Conclusion

Surveys are a great way to get insight into your customers’ needs and wants. But if you’re not careful, your survey can end up in the spam folder and never reach its intended audience.

When you send out surveys, it’s important to keep track of who has received them. You can use the message health scores in your account to see where your survey has been delivered and how much time is left before it expires.