Why your messages are getting flagged as spam—and how to avoid it

Have you noticed fewer unwanted emails in your inbox lately? Or wondered why you haven’t gotten an expected message, only to find it languishing in your junk folder? That’s not accidental: email providers are tightening their controls on inbox management.

New inbox screening techniques

Email providers like Google and Apple are using machine learning, optimized at the level of each email recipient’s inbox, to decide whether a message is likely to be legitimate. They’re looking at past recipient behavior, the performance of the message with other recipients, recent spam reports, best practice compliance, and a host of other factors to determine whether to send a message on to the inbox, shunt it to the spam folder, or reject it entirely. Along with these advances, the email providers are also upping their threshold for legitimacy—instead of assuming positive intent from email senders till proven otherwise, they are assuming that a sender is not legitimate until they see positive engagement from real recipients.

Today’s inbox screening technology represents a truly impressive level of AI-powered sophistication, designed to protect all of us from an overwhelming onslaught of correspondence. As an individual with an always-overflowing email inbox, I can appreciate the intent of these changes. As a marketer, though, these latest upgrades to inbox screening make my job significantly more complicated.

Implications for enrollment marketers

I’m not the only one conflicted about email providers’ inbox changes. Google and its peers are making email marketing more difficult for everyone, most especially those who work in higher education and enrollment. Unlike email marketing practitioners in other industries, who primarily send emails to existing customers or opt-in subscribers, enrollment marketers rely on large third-party-sourced prospect lists in early stages of campaigns; they are often emailing students who haven’t previously engaged and who are comparatively unlikely to engage in any given communication. As providers’ back-end email filtering becomes more sophisticated, colleges and universities are disproportionately affected because of this large, relatively “cold” audience.

Despite the growing deliverability challenges, email remains a cornerstone of a robust multichannel strategy. Our student and parent surveys consistently find that email represents students’ and families’ preferred channel for hearing directly from colleges. And EAB campaign data demonstrates that email is still the highest-volume and most-attributable channel to encourage student actions.

A growing challenge

In the past, adding another email to a campaign carried little risk—that extra touchpoint could help you break through to a few more students and get a few more applications. With the newer deliverability rules, however, there’s significant potential for that extra email to trigger spam filters, damaging your sender reputation. Even worse: as easy as it is now to get flagged as an undesirable email sender, it is increasingly hard to recover.

That said, Google and Yahoo aren’t trying to make higher ed marketers’ lives more difficult. Their goal is to enhance the value of the email channel. The good news? A well-managed, sophisticated email strategy can give your institution a competitive advantage.

Here are three tips to overcome email deliverability challenges.

1. Focus on engagement

It seems too simple to be true, but the single most important attribute of an email campaign to make sure it gets delivered is for the campaign to have strong engagement, as measured by click and open rates. Now more than ever, marketers need to be driving engagement and action with each email communication, paring back elements of the campaign are underperforming from an engagement perspective.

2. Monitor vigilantly

It’s still important to be persistent in your email strategy—our campaign data has long demonstrated the value in sending enough emails to students to maximize total response. But today, you must also ensure your strategy includes careful monitoring and a risk-mitigating campaign structure. For example, at EAB, we closely track deliverability rates and test new strategies within our Enroll360 campaigns to see what will move the needle. But we don’t just watch—we intervene to modulate and optimize campaigns when we start to see signs of deliverability trouble, and our latest campaigns are building in AI-powered modulation and optimization steps to reduce the risk of deliverability missteps in the first place.

Why Do Students Pick the Schools They Do?

3. Tailor your campaign structure to different audiences

To minimize your chances of being flagged as spam, be deliberate about the types and volume of emails each audience can tolerate, analyzing past campaign performance and segmenting by audience, market, and other variables. What is the optimal composition of your campaign among audiences who are most likely and least likely to engage?

It’s now especially important to weigh the deliverability risk of distant markets or aspirational audiences and adjust accordingly. For example, a regional institution expanding recruitment to out-of-state students shouldn’t simply drop those students into an existing campaign without modification and monitoring. New-market prospects, who are less familiar with your school, are likely to be less engaged than typical audiences, especially at first; a high-intensity email cadence sent to these less engaged audiences could affect your domain reputation or even trigger spam complaints.

At EAB, we’re refining our senior-year Enroll360 campaigns to automate these distinctions at scale. With senior-year inboxes flooded with messages, ensuring the right balance is more important than ever.

Looking ahead

As email providers continue evolving their standards, so must we. I hope these insights help you refine your institution’s email strategy, and we’ll keep monitoring these changes and sharing best practices to help you stay ahead.