Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
If you're like the 41% of email marketing professionals who responded to our State of Email 2023 survey, email marketing is your most effective marketing channel. But did you know that over 14 of all emails never reach your inbox?
While email deliverability can seem like a mystery at times, you don't have to cross your fingers and hope that your messages end up where you want them to. With Litmus Spam Testing, you can identify and fix issues that could otherwise send your emails to spam – long before you hit send.
Read on to learn more about why spam testing is so important, what it can help you identify, and how to do it.
What is Litmus Spam Test?
Litmus Spam Testing scans your emails using more than 20 different tests and identifies any problems that could prevent them from ending up in the inbox. The best part is that it provides actionable advice on how to troubleshoot these issues before you hit submit.
What factors affect email deliverability?
Many factors can affect the deliverability of your emails. Litmus' pre-send spam test gives you insight into what could be causing your email to be marked as spam, so you can troubleshoot any issues before you hit send. Here are the top filters to test against and why they are important.
Email authentication
Email authentication involves checking the source of an email to determine whether it is valid. Email authentication, also called domain authentication or validation, helps prevent spoofing and phishing scams (e.g. emails that are supposed to look like they come from Amazon or your bank – but that is not the case).
Here are some of the authentications our email spam test takes into account:
- DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). Indicates that your email address is associated with your domain. This, in turn, essentially allows your organization to take ownership of your email.
- Domain-based message authentication, reporting and compliance (DMARC). Designed to combat phishing and help you identify if a sender is trying to impersonate you.
- Unsubscribe from list. An optional email header that allows for a simple and consistent unsubscribe action.
- Sender Policy Framework (SPF). Allows a domain owner to specify multiple IP addresses or domains that can send email on their behalf via a DNS TXT record.
- TLS. STARTTLS or Opportunistic TLS. Provides senders with the ability to encrypt emails in transit.
- Brand Message Identification Indicators (BIMI). A way for inbox providers to verify information about your brand. Allows you to display a sender logo next to your messages in the inbox for increased trust and visibility.
Placement filter
Placement filters evaluate emails based on a set of criteria that change over time. These filters consider a combination of engagement, reputation, authentication, formatting, and content and word triggers. Litmus Spam Testing checks your emails using the following placement filters:
- AOL email
- Gmail
- GMX
- Go Daddy
- G Suite
- Mail.com
- Mail.ru
- Office 365
- outlook
- Web.de
- Yahoo
Rating filter
These values show you the likelihood that a spam filtering tool will intercept your email and move it to someone else's spam inbox.
- Barracuda. Barracuda Essentials for Email Security is a sophisticated anti-spam and email analysis tool commonly used by large companies.
- Microsoft Exchange Online Protection. Uses an integrated malware and spam filter to evaluate and rate emails.
- Outlook desktop. Outlook has a built-in junk email filter that “learns” spam emails over time.
- SpamAssassin. An open source spam filter that analyzes email headers and bodies using text analysis, Bayesian filtering, DNS blocklists, and collaborative filtering databases.
Blocklist filters
A blacklist is a real-time collection of senders believed to cause spam or other types of email abuse. Blacklist providers may use a combination of spam traps, spam complaints, and other proprietary data sources as criteria for adding a sender to a blacklist. Inbox providers often maintain their own proprietary block lists and use them in combination with independent third-party block lists.
Why are email spam tests important?
You can't look at an email and know if it's going to go to the spam folder.
Avoiding the spam folder requires much more than not using certain words or symbols in your email subject lines. There are so many issues that could potentially land you in the spam folder that you can't manually predict the possible problems – from blacklists to email content to different ratings and weights that a spam filter uses decides whether an email is spam.
In fact, following an email filtering bill that claims political email communications are unfairly spam, Google is currently in discussions with lawmakers to explore a pilot program that would “enhance greater transparency in the Ensures email deliverability while still allowing users to protect their email inboxes by unsubscribing or marking emails as spam.”
Emails in the spam folder are wasting your opportunity
Nearly 65% of email marketers who responded to our State of Email 2023 report ranked email among their top three marketing channels. If your emails end up in the spam folder, you've missed this opportunity!
Protect your email deliverability and sender reputation
Spam testing can help you detect and fix problems before sending, protecting your email deliverability and your sender's reputation.
Maximize your chances of gaining subscribers
You send emails to attract subscribers with a specific goal in mind. But the way they interact with your messages also shows that people from inbox providers actually want to interact with your messages. If they know you are a trusted sender, inbox providers are more likely to put your messages where you want them – in the inbox!
What is Litmus Spam Test?
Litmus Spam Testing scans your emails using more than 20 different tests and identifies any problems that could prevent them from ending up in the inbox. The best part is that it provides actionable advice on how to troubleshoot these issues before you hit submit.
Here's how to start the litmus spam test
There are several ways to run a spam test in Litmus.
Run a spam test in Litmus
To perform a full test of all filters, first log in and navigate to the Test tab. From there, select “View and create spam tests” from the slider menu.
Here you can start a new spam test or view the results of a recent spam test.
Run a spam test with ESP Sync
You can also use ESP sync to select an email from your drafts to send to Litmus when you start a new spam test.
Run a shortened spam test
Finally, you can run a shortened spam test every time you send a test email to Litmus.
Simply send your email to Litmus with your Litmus test address. Then navigate to the end of your preview and QA results.
This will display your DKIM, DMARC, SPF, and BIMI authentication results, as well as Outlook Desktop Filtering and Domain Block List results.
The most critical errors are typically seen in your authentication, so this abbreviated test highlights the most important results.
How do you interpret the spam test results?
Once your spam test has run, you'll see a high-level summary of your results. From here you can dive deeper into the issues uncovered.
Litmus spam test results
If a filter shows a green square or says “Pass,” you’re good to go!
If a filter displays a yellow square or is marked as a minor issue, you can continue sending. However, it's a good idea to check what the filter flagged so you can monitor the problem. Untreated problems can become critical over time.
If a filter displays a red square or is marked as a critical issue, do not click Submit until you resolve the flagged issues. When you click to review the results of this filter, a sidebar appears with recommended action steps. You may want to involve the person who manages your email infrastructure to help you resolve any issues before you proceed with sending emails.
If a filter is not available, it means we have not received your test. There could be several reasons for this, which we can help you resolve.
Why you need to run regular spam tests
Email clients are updated every 1.2 days on average, and you may not be aware of the changes at all. The spam filter algorithms are also regularly updated. And sometimes your IT or development team changes an IP address without realizing it affects email. Absolutely – an email spam test will help you stay informed!
Landing in the spam folder isn't just damaging to your marketing campaigns and reputation. It costs you in wasted resources, lost revenue, and missed opportunities to engage with your subscribers. In some cases, it may even be necessary to hire a company to improve your sender reputation.
Make it a best practice in your email workflows to regularly run spam tests and keep your email campaigns alive!
Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
