Why spam isn’t the end of the road for your email marketing
In short: being marked as spam is almost always the result of a few fixable practices, not a reason to give up on email marketing. Authenticate your domain, keep your lists clean, segment your audience, and send relevant, honest content—do those four things and spam stops being a roadblock.
Many small business marketers hold a misconception that email marketing isn’t effective or worth trying due to their campaigns potentially being marked as spam. If you’re a small business owner who wants to use email marketing for its cost-effectiveness and flexibility, yet shy away because of the spam factor, this article is for you.
We’re here to shed light on a few things that’ll help you understand the nuances of spam and how to avoid letting it become a roadblock to executing a successful email marketing campaign.
What is spam?
In today’s email marketing world, spam is largely the result of some bad practices and irrelevant targeting. In a moment, we’ll explain how to remedy these mistakes.
But how and why did spam come into existence? In general, spam is an unsolicited email sent by someone in an attempt to dupe people. A good example is an email that says your bank account is locked for security reasons and wants you to click a link for immediate recovery.
To protect people from email scams, ISPs (Internet Service Providers) and ESPs (Email Service Providers) like Gmail, Yahoo, Zoho Mail, and more have set stringent rules and regulations for what emails can successfully arrive in your inbox. They also build and maintain spam filters and algorithms to run compliance checks on every email. So if you’re not complying with the standards, you’re preemptively considered a spammer, even if your intentions are good.
Those standards are no longer just guidelines. Since February 2024, Google’s sender guidelines and Yahoo—followed by Microsoft from May 2025—require bulk senders (5,000+ messages a day) to authenticate with SPF and DKIM, publish a DMARC policy, offer one-click unsubscribe, and keep their spam-complaint rate below 0.3% (ideally under 0.1%). Mail that fails these checks can be rejected outright, so meeting them is the baseline for reaching the inbox at all.
Now, assuming your emails pass the test of ISPs and ESPs, your contacts may mark you as spam if your messages are irrelevant or not useful to them. The bottom line is, you’ll be in trouble only when you don’t follow the basics before launching your campaign.
How to avoid spam
Now that you know what spam is and what flags your email as spam, here’s a list of practices that make your campaigns safe and fruitful.
Use an authenticated domain
What’s the first thing you would do after buying a vehicle? You lawfully register it for official identification. Similarly, once you have your email marketing database and software ready, buying your own domain and authenticating it should be your next move. These records act as the “license plate” for your emails when they are stopped and checked to see if they are spam.
At a minimum you’ll set up SPF and DKIM, but the current baseline is all three of SPF, DKIM, and a published DMARC policy (start at p=none and tighten to quarantine or reject over time), plus one-click unsubscribe on your marketing mail. You can set these up through Zoho Campaigns’ domain authentication settings.
As a bonus, using your own domain (for example, xyz@zylker.com) creates a sense of security for contacts who see your email, ultimately increasing your brand value. Since spammers generally use free domains of ESPs to send spam, your emails look highly suspicious in the eyes of spam filters if you don’t use your domain.
You Should Know: DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) signs your message so mailbox providers can confirm it wasn’t altered in transit—but on its own it’s no longer enough. Pair it with SPF and DMARC, since the major providers now expect all three together.Clean your email lists regularly
As an email marketer, you go back to the drawing board if your contacts are not opening the emails. But what if the contacts you presume are active don’t exist at all?
Emails sent to invalid and inactive email addresses return as a bounce. If the trend continues and your bounce rate becomes far too high, your sender reputation (a score assigned by ESPs) takes a beating. Once the score goes below the defined level, your emails land in your contacts’ spam folder. Suppress hard bounces immediately, and drop addresses that soft-bounce repeatedly, so your bounce and complaint rates stay low enough to keep a hygienic list.
To ensure this doesn’t happen, you’ll have to clean your mailing lists often. Moreover, following a double opt-in process—where new subscribers confirm their address by clicking a link—helps you add only valid, genuinely interested contacts into your lists.
Segment your target audience
Imagine ordering a pizza online while you’ve barely eaten anything, only to see the delivery man bring cupcakes after an hour. You’d be upset, right? Your contacts also might feel the same way if they receive emails that are irrelevant to them. For instance, you can’t send a lead prospecting email to a mailing list that also has your customers’ email addresses.
Segmentation matters more than ever, because the major providers now grade you on engagement: when uninterested contacts ignore, delete, or report your mail, that pulls down inbox placement for your whole list. Sending relevant mail to the right people is a deliverability tactic, not just a courtesy.
But how do you understand your recipients’ tastes and preferences and segment them? There are two ways to do it:
- Using your audience’s profile information (location, demographics) and behavior metrics (like clicks and opens).
- Configuring different topics and letting your contacts choose their preferred ones when they subscribe. Assuming your company is product-based, you can have topics like product releases, updates, offers and discounts, and more. Needless to say, each topic should be associated with a mailing list.
Craft clean and targeted content
Half the job of creating targeted content is done when you segment your audience. Segmentation gives you small subsets of your user group, helping you know what to send to whom.
As far as your actual content goes, start by keeping the subject line highly relevant to your message. This way, you’re not baiting your audience to open the email and potentially annoying them straight to the “report” button. Furthermore, avoid using shortened URLs inside your email, as most spammers use them to conceal their identity.
Note: Providing easy access to CTAs and a working one-click unsubscribe link is highly important—honoring opt-outs within two days is now a requirement, not a nicety. Adding your brand logo can benefit you further, and once you reach DMARC enforcement you can even display a verified logo in the inbox through BIMI.We hope this helped you understand why spam doesn’t take the shine off your email marketing. Here’s an ebook that explains in greater detail how to master email deliverability (finding the inboxes of your contacts).