When using a Send Email Action to send messages to your colleagues, your survey respondent, or other recipients, sometimes you'll find that the messages either don't arrive in their inbox or end up in their spam or junk folder. While there are many reasons why this may happen and they can vary from one email address to another; there are some best practices for avoiding many of delivery problems.
What Is Your From Address?
The Senders Email Address field is a handy way to show that your message is coming from an email address of your choice. By default, Alchemer uses one of our addresses, noreply@alchemer.com, for this field.
Using noreply@alchemer.com is the best practice.
Email services can distinguish between the actual sending email address and the masked from address. Email Service Providers (ESPs) often choose to bounce or place messages in spam when the actual sending address and the masked sending address are different. The is most likely to happen when the Senders Email Address and the Recipient Email Address both share the same email suffix (e.g.. @gmail.com, @yourcompany.com, etc.).
Note: noreply@alchemer.com is an unmonitored email address and will not return a message
In order to customize your Send Email Action From Address, you will need to configure a Custom Email Settings integration. This will mitigate against the above-mentioned spam issue.
What Is Your Email Subject Line?
Recipients will commonly ignore, delete or report as spam emails that have subject lines with some choice keywords. ESPs also programmatically send emails with trigger words to spam. Here are some keywords/phrases to avoid using in your subject line:
save, free, sell, buy, deal, discount, offer, make money, work from home, and basically anything related to selling/anything sexually related.
You can find our best advice on getting the best delivery on your emails here:
http://www.marketergizmo.com/email-marketing-best-practices-stay-out-spam/
What Is Your Reply To Address?
To ensure your email is delivered appropriately, it is recommended to have the From and Reply To Address match. Different From and Reply To addresses may cause emails to be marked as spam and to fail to make it to the recipient. This is a known issue when sending to Google accounts.
Just like using your own Senders Email Address for your message, the Reply To Email Address can cause similar problems with deliverability of your messages. ESPs may bounce messages that have a Reply To email address with the same suffix as the recipient's email address.
Instead of using the Reply To Email Address field you might instead add reply to instructions to the body of your email.
Note: Notifications@alchemer.com is an unmonitored email address and will not return a message
Are you using Custom SMTP Settings for your Send Email action?
Some company environments might require certain Sender Email Addresses and Reply To Email Addresses. Custom SMTP settings can help to ensure better deliverability in these settings.
SMTP settings allow you to send your Send Email Action messages through your own email server (or a third party provided like SendGrid). This is commonly an email service run by an IT team at the company in question. You'll likely need to get in contact with your IT team for these settings and approval to use them. Visit our Custom Email Settings tutorial for more information on Custom SMTP settings.
Learn more about Best Practices to Stay Out of the Spam Folder.
