Why are your emails going to spam? If you ignore me for long enough, then the emails I send you are gonna go to spam.
Every single email you send is either gonna help or it’s gonna hinder your reputation.
I know, if you guys have been listening to me any length of time, you know I am probably one of the most anal guys when it comes to email marketing and why you need to focus on email.
But not just building a list, but having an engaged list.
And honestly, Adrian Savage, creator of Visibility Center, is one of those guys who has made it his core mission to help people get better engagement on their email lists, and I’ve been using some of his stuff for years.
He’s a great guy. When I really started paying attention to deliverability, it was actually through him and his platform, you know?
Key takeaways
If someone hasn’t opened your email in the last 17 days the chances are they never, ever will again.
The worst possible sign of disengagement is your email landing in spam and then they leave it there.
If you rescue an email from spam, that’s one of the best engagement signals you can get, ’cause it means that someone has actually made the effort to find the email.
And, you know, you do not need a six-figure email list to be successful. You can have a few thousand.
Why are my emails going to spam?
Email started to really change once Google and Gmail in particular started to really grow.
But when Gmail came out, then suddenly everything exploded. Everyone had a free Gmail address.
And the problem is if something suddenly becomes free, we become the product.
And, you know, let’s face it, Google did not do that to lose money. Google released Gmail to make a ton of money.
The way they’re gonna make money is if someone opens the email, they display an ad, and someone clicks on the link in that ad, and Google makes money.
So suddenly, if we’re sending out emails to our audience, it’s not just, do we send something that our audience wants to see? But it’s like, well, are we gonna send something that Google’s gonna like?
And what is it that makes Google ultimately like us or not? Well, it’s what our open rate looks like.
If we send out 100,000 emails and we get a 5% open rate, then that’s only, like, 5,000 people opening emails and 5,000 people for Google to make money out of.
If you send 100,000 people and you get a 50% open rate then Google can suddenly make money out of 10 times more people. They can make money out of 50,000.
So Google are obviously gonna favor you the better your open rate is.
And, you know, if I’m on Adrian’s email list and he’s mailing me every couple of days, and I ignore his emails, Google are gonna very quickly pick up on that and they’ll say, hey, Mark isn’t opening Adrian’s emails. Why should we show them to him?
Now, the thing is, if John down the road is opening his emails, the ones he sends to John won’t go to spam.
So it’s no longer just one big spam filter.
What Google are doing, and what everyone else is doing now, is they’re tailoring the way they process the emails depending on each person’s behavior. What they read and what they don’t read.
If you’ve got a list of 50,000 people on Google, you’re dealing with 50,000 spam filters.
Does your email platform affect deliverability?
Adrian became the first Infusionsoft certified consultant to get 100% in the exam, back in 2012. And very quickly when he started working with email marketers, he found that some of them were having problems getting their emails seen, even back then.
Back in 2012, the rules were very different then to what they are now. You can’t market like it’s 2012 anymore.
The big reason that people struggled back then was because the only game in town was, well, what’s the reputation of the IP address sending the emails out? And some platforms had good reputations, some platforms had bad reputations, and it was simple as that.
But then things started to shift because then they brought in all these techy things like email authentication that we’ve all grown to know and love now.
You know, we can’t send an email out now unless it’s got a DKIM signature on it, and that signature tells us that that’s come from our domain.
So nowadays, the reputation of the sending platform doesn’t really matter anymore, although everyone still talks about that and they say, hey, ActiveCampaign’s got bad deliverability, MailChimp’s got good deliverability, which is actually a load of BS, to be honest.
There’s some people out there that are getting a 10% new lead engagement rate. There’s other people that are getting a 92, 93% new lead engagement rate, and they use the same platform.
People will blame it on their platform, even in 2026, when it’s the sender’s reputation that matters now.
What is inbox visibility?
How can we get as many people as possible to see the emails that you send out? That’s what Adrian now calls inbox visibility.
Because let’s face it, if you’ve got the same email list or if you’re spending the same amount on ads or whatever you’re doing, if you can get more people to see the same stuff you’re sending out, you’re gonna get more conversions and make more money out of it.
A lot of people don’t understand that. Adrian had one prospect that didn’t become a client because, how do I say this politely?
They didn’t understand that 50% of the emails they sent out weren’t being seen by anyone.
So out of the 30 grand a month they were spending on ads, they were literally setting $15,000 a month on fire.
How do you stop emails going to spam?
The golden rule still has to be follow the rules that Google set, because Google is the great big, you know, behemoth in the email world. And we’ve gotta make sure that we follow their rules, and Microsoft and Yahoo are up there as well.
And the good news is, most of the rules they set are similar. But we’ve gotta behave in a way that Google’s gonna approve, ’cause if not, they can slam us in Google jail faster than you can say deliverability.
1. It’s all about the offer
First off, it’s all about the offer.
Like you need to have an offer that is really irresistible in front of the right audience, where they want what you are giving them so bad that they’re gonna go search for it ’cause they really wanna make sure they get it.
And there’s a little bit of kind of alignment needed here. You’ve gotta have a good offer, you’ve gotta have a good lead magnet, you’ve gotta have a good ad.
They’ve all gotta match each other because, you know, if they sign up for some kind of widget, and the email that you send them is about sprockets, they’re gonna ignore it.
Adrian has been working with a client based in Europe. When he started working with them, they had hurt their reputation to the point where less than 25% of their new leads were seeing something.
They went from 25% of their new leads opening to 75% of their new leads opening. So that was like a 3X improvement on their return on ad spend.
But then the agency they were working with very clearly didn’t do the best job with the ads.
The relevancy started to slip. The audience wasn’t the right fit for the offer.
So even though their technical deliverability is still really good, they’ve gone from 75% opening to 65% because it’s not such a good match.
So you gotta make sure that it’s the right ad to the right audience with the right offer.
2. Check the spam folder straight away
This is the thing that people don’t understand. When someone joins your email list and you send that first email, even if you’re doing everything as you should, the chances are maybe 50/50 whether that email lands in the inbox or the spam folder.
So first and foremost, you’ve gotta educate people right from the get-go. If they sign up to your email list, you need them to go and check their spam folder straight away.
Because the worst possible sign of disengagement is your email landing in spam and then they leave it there.
If they do that, then the chances are that every single email you send in the future is also gonna end up in spam. And it doesn’t even matter if you’ve got a good reputation, unfortunately.
But even that isn’t enough. Not just check the spam folder, but drag it out of the spam folder into the inbox, mark it as safe.
Because if you don’t do that and it just gets left there then you’re essentially telling Google, I don’t wanna hear from this person again.
If you rescue an email from spam, that’s one of the best engagement signals you can get ’cause it means that someone has actually made the effort to find the email and say, hey, I wanna keep this. I wanna hear from this person.
3. Get people to reply
A close second to that is get people to reply. You know, that takes real effort.
Here’s a little strategy.
I mean, the big thing is you have your main offer, which you could have somebody opt into, and it’s just super irresistible. They wanna find it.
But the cool thing is, once they find that email, you could have something in there that says, hey, by the way, I got something else for you too. If you reply back to this email, I’ll send it to you.
It’s like a one-two punch. You know what I mean?
Get them to want to open the email and find it, click whatever it is, and then reply back to you. You got a win right there.
Because if someone joins your list and you can’t get them to engage right at the start when they’re most motivated then you don’t stand much chance a few weeks down the line.
4. It’s a two-way
I’ve been doing this now for almost 20 years and, I mean, it was drilled into my head back in 2007, 2008, you know, the list, the list, nothing but the list. And I still believe that today.
But the truth is it has changed and, you know, a lot of people still treat their email list like a one-way promo tool.
I’ve really adopted the idea that I don’t look at my email list as just a one-way communication. It’s a two-way.
And so I treat it more like a social network than I do, you know, like people are like, we wanna juice the algorithm on Facebook. So they go and they comment, and they do all these other things.
It’s like you can do that with email and get way more bang for your buck than you would on social, ’cause that little juicing you do might last you 24 hours, 48 hours, whereas you do it with an email, man, you’re gonna get way more out of it.
5. Get someone to reply or click
Okay, some people don’t put call to actions in emails, but Adrian’s a bit old-fashioned.
Every single email you send should either get someone to reply or click. There’s gotta be some kind of call to action.
Most of the time we want clicks and we want replies.
6. Mail the assets, not the liabilities
There’s absolutely no point sending emails to people that are ignoring you. You know, if you’ve mailed someone for the past month and they haven’t opened a single darn email you’ve sent, why on earth are they gonna open the next one?
We wanna send emails to people that open in the last 30 days. It used to be 90, but 30 days, it’s still more than the point of no return. It does depend on the audience.
The best folks on your list who’ve opened recently, they’re the assets because we want our email to be an asset. You know, if you’re mailing a ton of unengaged people, your email list is a liability.
So we wanna not mail the liabilities, we wanna mail the assets, and as long as you’re mailing the assets as frequently as you can that’s gonna help.
7. Your permission to mail
The bottom line now is your permission to mail, and that doesn’t mean the rules. What really matters is, what is someone subconsciously giving you permission to do?
‘Cause when they sign up to your email list, they are giving you permission to message them there and then, for sure. And as long as you continue to engage with them, then that permission will not lapse.
But if you ignore them for a couple of months and then, say, mail them out of the blue, they’re gonna say, Adrian who? Hit the spam button, you’re out of there.
I’ve been on people’s lists and I know I’m on their list.
I just got an email a couple days ago, and it’s like, oh, by the way, I’ve got something I’m launching soon. Come on, man.
If you’re a really strong personal brand that someone knows well, then maybe you’ll get away with it. But for a typical brand mailing an audience that hasn’t got that much loyalty, an email list that hasn’t been mailed for three months is pretty stale, and you might get some of it back.
But if it’s a year, then you can mainly kiss that list goodbye.
8. Authentication
You’ve gotta make sure your SPF, your DKIM, your DMARC is set up.
DMARC reporting, that’s something that is worth looking at, because we know that authentication is gonna get tightened up at some point.
At some point Google, Microsoft, Yahoo are gonna say, you can’t have a DMARC policy where the policy is none. We’re gonna have a quarantine policy in place.
And if you’re not monitoring what your authentication is doing you might not realize if your emails suddenly start failing.
9. Don’t try and game the system
When you try and game the system and get out of promotions into the inbox, then it’s like a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
You know? It’s not what it makes out to be.
In the past there’s been this software that will get people out of promotions, and the way they do it is they just put all this kind of garbage boilerplate text at the bottom of each email.
Google have got smart to that, so what the latest software does is it puts a different version of the boilerplate text at the bottom of every email. Which is great, but that’s something called hash busting and spammers have been using it for years and years to try and get around spam detection.
It’s black hat. Marcel, who’s kind of very high up in email at Yahoo, he’s actually gone on record to say that when Yahoo find people using that software, they will block them.
You know, it’s much easier and much better and much simpler in the long run just to do the simple things. Be a good email citizen and don’t try and game the system.
What is the point of no return in email marketing?
There’s a metric that Adrian created that he doesn’t know that anyone else uses, and he calls it the point of no return.
So what he’ll do is he’ll look at someone’s email history, their sending history for, say, six months, and say, okay, how many days can you go and someone will still come back and open your email?
And the scary thing is, three or four years ago, that point of no return was around 30 days.
But here we are in 2026, and for a typical business to consumer email list, it’s somewhere between 14 and 17 days.
It does vary depending on the audience, the age, and lots of other things. If someone hasn’t opened your email in the last 17 days the chances are they never, ever will again.
If you look at the point of no return for clicks it’s somewhere between 100 and 150 days. People will not click for three or four months, and then come back and click something.
So if you’re excluding people from your email list after they, say, haven’t clicked for 60 days or something like that, then you’re excluding a lot of people that could still come back.
What is a good email open rate?
I remember going back to, you know, 2015, 2017, a good open rate was 20 to 25%.
These days, with everything being inflated the way it is, a good open rate is 50 to 60%, which means, in reality, maybe you got 25 to 30% of people really opening.
Because Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection probably about doubles the open rate that you’re really getting.
If you’re getting open rates of less than about 50%, it suggests that you’re not managing your engagement properly.
So, if you’re getting a 50 to 60% open rate week in, week out that’s a good signal that your engagement is staying pretty solid. If that suddenly drops off, you need to worry because something’s gone wrong.
But the trend really matters with this stuff.
Should you ignore email open rates?
‘Cause the crazy thing is, all that we can see as marketers is an open signal, which is about 50% reliable if we’re lucky.
So, you know, you’ve got all these marketing experts saying you have got to ignore email opens. Adrian is actually gonna challenge that, and I believe we should challenge that too.
Like let’s just say we don’t get an indicator back that there was an open. It doesn’t mean it wasn’t opened.
Maybe the Gmail sees that it was opened, they have all that data, but our little tracking pixel may not have said, hey, it was opened. So in reality, you could even have a higher potential open rate than what you’re even getting back.
So we have got to look at opens as one signal of engagement. But at the same time, if someone has opened every single email that you’ve sent in months, but they haven’t clicked anything for, like, a year, that suggests they probably aren’t really engaging with you.
Does delivered mean it landed in the inbox?
No. One of the kind of bits of headline news that people don’t always know is that email is not designed to be a reliable, guaranteed communication medium.
And the problem you’ve got is that just because something gets accepted for delivery doesn’t mean it’s gonna make it into the inbox.
Whether it’s, you know, GoHighLevel, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, it doesn’t matter what you use, they all work the same way.
They’re gonna try and send one email after another, and supposing you’re using Gmail, they’ll go knocking on Gmail’s door and say, hey, I’ve got an email for Mark. Are you gonna accept it, yes or no?
But just because it’s been accepted and it says it’s been delivered, then there’s all the other stuff we’ve gotta go through.
You know, Google will check the authentication.
They’re gonna look at the content. They’re gonna look at the reputation.
And then they might put it into the spam folder, or they might put it into the inbox. They might put it into promotions.
So it got delivered, but not where you necessarily wanted it.
The only people that know where an email has been delivered are the people that receive it and the mailbox provider itself, be that Google, Microsoft, Yahoo or whatever. And other than that, we are guessing.
How can you tell how good your reputation really is?
Now in the good old days, this time last year, Google had a really good report in their free Postmaster Tools that told you what your domain reputation was.
But Google, for reasons best known to themselves, they’ve decided to get rid of that report. So we can no longer go to Google and say, hey, what do you think of me?
Google explains the change on its own Gmail Help page about the old Postmaster Tools.
The best way you can check your reputation as a sender is to see what happens to your new leads.
If I sign up for someone’s email list today, and I’ve never received an email from them before, Google can’t look at my behavior to work out what to do with it.
So the only thing they can do is say, well, what do we think of this person as a sender? What is their reputation?
And the better the reputation is, the more likely it is to land in the inbox. The worse it is, the more likely it is to go to spam.
And if you’re getting a lot of your new lead emails getting opened, then you can infer from that that you’ve got a good reputation.
One of the metrics Adrian measures, and again, this is something that not many people look at, is what he calls the visibility index. What percentage of new leads are opening at least one email from you?
As long as they line up and you’ve got a good reputation, you should be getting 80, 85, 90% of your new leads opening at least one email from you in the first couple of weeks.
What is a good click-through rate for new leads?
Evan, who’s Adrian’s co-founder of EmailSmart, one of his clients is Martha Beck. Obviously a massive email list.
So because she has got a well-known brand with a well-known offer, and working with Evan, she’s got every single thing right with her inbox visibility, she is getting between 50 and 60% click rate of new leads.
Adrian sees most people getting 10 to 15%.
But then once you are up to 80 or 90% opens, if you’re only getting 20, 30% clicks, then you can probably improve your offer, improve your relevancy or just get better at making the call to action more prominent.
I gotta get my benchmark up. I was just looking at my little score and I’m like, oop, I got 21% click-through rate on new leads.
I wanna work on that.
Is a small, engaged email list better than a big one?
I really wanna point out here, and this is very important, I’ve generated a ton of leads over the years, like well over 200,000.
Like, but when you really get down to it, my active list today is very tiny.
Recently I competed in a big affiliate launch with Russell Brunson and some other people, and I was in the top 10. I got seventh place, with people that had six, seven, 800,000 people on their email list.
And here I am with this tiny list of about 8,000 people, and I’m right up there running.
We can get too wrapped up in the vanity metrics of thinking, oh, that’d be so awesome to have a list of a half a million people.
Really? Like I mean, really, I mean, that sounds sexy, but the truth is, if nobody’s buying and nobody’s seeing it, what the heck does it matter?
You’re just gonna be spending a lot of money sending email, you know? And you’re not getting it back, and that’s the key.
You do not need a six-figure email list to be successful. You can have a few thousand.
As long as you’ve got the right people on your list and you’re sending what they want, what they need with the right value, that’s what’s gonna work long term.
Is the Gmail promotions tab bad?
I don’t personally think it’s the end of the world. I mean, it’s like everybody talks bad about it, but the truth is I still check my Promos tab.
There was a big glitch. For three or four days, Google didn’t route emails to Promotions tab.
Everything landed in the Inbox for a few days.
And in that time, the unsubscribe rate on promotional emails went through the roof. Because suddenly people are seeing all this stuff and it’s like, hey, I don’t wanna be sold to right now.
When you think about it, if they go to the promos tab, they’re in a mindset to be promoted to.
So, you know, be open and honest with your stuff because if you’re open, honest, and authentic, then in the long term that’s what’s gonna work.
How do you use AI for emails without sounding like AI?
It doesn’t matter what AI brings along. It’s not gonna change that.
It’s just that, you know, the folks that can send stuff that don’t clearly look like AI slop are gonna be the ones that succeed.
If you mail your best assets with AI slop every single day, they’re very quickly gonna get upset with that and they’re gonna start unsubscribing or ignoring you.
But you’ve gotta use it carefully, ’cause otherwise it can help you make mistakes much more quickly.
It’s, you know, I use AI to help me write everything, but it’ll go through five, six renditions before I’m ready for it.
People still wanna feel the emotional connection. And AI can’t yet do emotion.
And I make no qualm, my audience knows I use AI, but I still want it to be like me, still want it to sound like me.
I don’t want junk out there.
How do you check your email health for free?
Now I know Adrian’s got a great tool. I use it every day.
It’s called Visibility Center. And the beauty with that is there’s enough of it that works no matter what email platform you use.
Visibility Center is gonna look at things like authentication, so it’s gonna make sure your SPF, your DKIM, your DMARC is set up. It’s got a content analyzer in there.
Visibility Center will look at what you’ve been sending and it’ll say, right, your visibility index is this, so that’ll tell you how much you’re losing on your ad spend. SMART score tells you how well you’re managing your engagement.
But the basic important stuff, anyone can go to visibilitycenter.com and just register for that and it will tell you what your authentication looks like, what your SMART score is, what your visibility index is.
And if you look at no other metrics, that’s enough to tell you how safe and how healthy your email sending is.
Final Thoughts
And, you know, you remember the old days when you could send a bulk email with a Gmail account? You can’t do that anymore.
Every single email you send is either gonna help or it’s gonna hinder your reputation.
Well, guys, absolutely go over to visibilitycenter.com, right? Head over there and check it out, and get in there.
If you know somebody that’ll benefit, make sure you share it.
You rock,
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