When it comes to deliverability, you need to act quickly to prevent any future damage to your sales pipeline.

This article walks you through a quick and simple process to check where your emails are landing and why they are going to spam - if you find them there - in less than 15 minutes.

Ready to get started?

Step 1: The trigger

First, you need a reason to test if your emails are going to spam. We recommend you to run a spam test when:

• You’ve noticed open rates dropping below 40%
• It’s time to run a periodic test (e.g. you can do a spam test every quarter)
• You’re just curious to know where your emails are landing

Step 2: Make sure you have all you need

You’ll need at least 4 email accounts (2 Gmail accounts and 2 Outlook accounts). If you don’t have any, feel free to create them now or ask a friend to monitor them for you.

• Create 2 Gmail accounts
• Create 2 Outlook accounts

Note: You'll need these accounts to test the email template that had a low open rate.

Step 3: Send the test emails

Create a new campaign targeted at the email accounts you just created for this test and hit send!

Note: Make sure you use the same template AND the same mailbox that didn’t perform well (or whatever template/mailboxes you use regularly in case of a periodic test).

Step 4: Open each mailbox and see where the email has landed

Time to face the truth. Open each mailbox you used to receive the email template and see where it’s landing.

This is how you should proceed for each situation:

• Email is found in the primary inbox:

Congrats, you have a healthy deliverability score! Keep up the good work 💪

Important Note: Although you have a good deliverability score it doesn’t mean that you should be happy with the lower open rates that made you run this spam test. You now know that the low open rates aren’t caused by deliverability issues, so you’ll want to perform tests for different subject lines and content in order to increase your open rates.

• Email is found in the promotions folder:

This means that your email was recognized as promotional, thus, landing in the same place as all marketing newsletter emails. The good news is that this doesn’t mean a bad deliverability score, but you can do better!

We recommend you download our Deliverability Guide to learn how to improve it.

• Email is found in the spam folder:

If you find your email in spam, we recommend you reduce, or even stop, email activity - at least with the email template that is having low open rates.

Then, you should explore our Amplemarket Unspam service - feel free to check it out here and reach out to support@amplemarket.com.

• Email isn't delivered:

This is the least common situation, but it can happen to anyone. This means that you might be running into an email/domain configuration issue.

We recommend you to look into this issue with your engineering team and test your emails with mail-tester.com. Solve all the issues found and test it again!

Let's recap…

In summary, the process boils down to:

1. Identify a sales campaign with less than a 40% open rate
2. Create or ask for 4 email accounts (Gmail + Outlook)
3. Send email template to the 4 email addresses you just created
4. See where the emails are landing
5. Landed in spam? Reach out to support@amplemarket and evaluate our Amplemarket Unspam service today.

Hope you found this helpful!