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9 Comments

Newsletter going to spam

I recently launched https://the-ux-mini-course.com and have gotten some reports of the first email going to spam. My tests confirm the problem.

I'm using SendPulse.com and the course is single opt-in

How do y'all debug this?

Thank you in advance!

on December 24, 2019
  1. 4

    A few things to check and reconfigure:

    1. use a different domain than you're using personally.
    2. are you using an @gmail.com? if so, then move over to a custom domain immediately.
    3. Take out every single potential spam word. Lots of innocuous words here. Take them all out. Check here: https://blog.benchmarkemail.com/email-spam-trigger-words/
    4. Tell people when they sign up (not thank you) to check their spam and go manually move it to their primary box.
    5. Something I haven't tried yet.... add this to your workflow w/ zapier or manually... Send them an email from your name@ your domain.com . and tell them "Hey an email is coming to you soon, I just wanted to introduce myself." and then trigger the auto email from your course and your name. You can add things like "reply yes/no to if you want to do a call". Any replies help your domain status and helps you increase your reputation to their own mail server. Because even a no.. they are replying.
    1. 1

      Great suggestions - thank you! Some of these I've already done, the rest I will look into.

  2. 2

    You can forward me a copy of your email and I can help look at it. It depends on a lot of variables and is hard to tell without seeing the email. (kday33@gmail.com)

    1. 1

      Thank you for offering!

      If it’s better, the direct sign up is at https://the-ux-mini-course.com

      If a forward is better, then I can send that your way tomorrow.

      Thank you again!!

      1. 2

        Cool. I got it and it also went into my spam. I'm looking at it now.

        1. 1

          Thank you so much for your help!

          1. 2

            I've been looking at it, and unfortunately I can't see anything wrong with it. I've checked:

            • Spam Blacklists for your domain and the sending IPs. Everything is clear there
            • SPF & DKIM configurations all look good
            • Content of the email looks fine

            At this point, I think you should contact your ESP, SendPulse, and ask them to help investigate. It looks like you have everything set up correctly and perhaps they have more data on your account or their systems that can help diagnose the issue.

            A few questions:

            • Have you used any other ESPs besides SendPulse in the past? If they can't figure it out, it might be worth a quick test on MailChimp or something like that to see if those get sent to spam also.
            • What is the history of the domain name cubicle6.com? Did you purchase that or have you been the sole owner? Could there have been spam emails coming from that domain in the past?
            • Is there a reason you're sending the emails from cubicle6.com instead of the-ux-mini-course.com?
            1. 1

              Thank you so much for your help on this @kday!

              I'm pretty sure I had a Mailchimp account years ago associated with the domain that got automatically closed due to inactivity...

              I'm the only owner of cubicle6.com ever and I've owned it for ~10 years. I'm using my email address on that domain because I've got a blog there that I'm aiming to grow the audience for.

              Per your suggestion, I've reached out to my ESP... we'll see what they say.

              Thank you again!

              1. 1

                No problem. I hope they can help. Seems like you've done everything correctly to me.