How To: Stop Your Emails Going To Junk – in 10 minutes or less!

December 23, 2023

It’s at the top of everyone’s Loathe List: your StudioNinja emails landing in your clients’ spam folders.

You get a new lead, you respond with a beautifully crafted email, and….you get ghosted.

Well, I have good news – I guarantee it can be fixed in under 10 minutes without any jargon or the need for a degree in computer science.

Are you ready? Let’s go!

Why do my emails land in clients’ junk folders?

When you send emails via a third party (i.e. StudioNinja, Dubsado, Flodesk, or any other platform), your email host doesn’t know if it’s really from you. Your email host might also be concerned that your email has been altered or tampered with somewhere between you typing it, and it reaching them.

So, we need to tell your email host that you approve emails from that third party – that way, it’ll flag them as safe – and, if we can, we also need to give the email host a way of verifying that the contents of that email have not been tampered with.

Let’s add your StudioNinja SPF Record

  1. Log in to your domain provider. This might be someone like GoDaddy, Wix, Google Workspace, or CrazyDomains – wherever you purchased your web domain.
  2. Find your DNS records.  They’re usually in your settings, under ‘domains’.
  3. Add a TXT Record and paste the following into the ‘value’ field: v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com include:spf.studioninja.co ~all (Note: this assumes you are using a gmail email host – if not, you need to get the correct code from your SMTP server settings in Settings>Email Settings>SMTP Server)
  4. Set the TTL value to 1 hour
  5. Your Host Name will be your domain name – e.g. toghub.com.au

Let’s add a Gmail DKIM Record too

If your email is hosted via Gmail, great news! You can improve deliverability even further by adding a DKIM record. This is what helps your email host verify that the contents of the email are trustworthy.

  1. Log into Gmail, click on the user icon in the top right and right at the top, click “admin console”
  2. On the left column go to: Apps > Google Workspace > Gmail > Authenticate Email.
  3. Follow the steps to generate a code.
  4. Go back to your domain provider and add this code to your DNS records as another TXT Record.
  5. Set the TTL value for both to 1 hour
  6. Go back to Google Workspace and click Authenticate Email – this can take up to 48 hours

And that’s it! Seriously, it’s that simple.

Now, this isn’t a silver bullet, and from time to time you’ll find that your emails still work their way into junk. Personally, I find this is worst when emailing hotmail addresses. BUT the above steps will take you less than 10 minutes and will significantly improve the deliverability of your emails.

An extra step – DMARC!

From 1 February 2024, all of this is getting even stricter. There’s one more record you can add which should help: DMARC.

  1. Head back to your domain provider and enter a new TXT record:
  2. Host name: _dmarc.[YOUR DOMAIN] – for example: _dmarc.toghub.com.au
  3. Value: v=DMARC1; p=none; adkim=r; aspf=r

What else can you do?

Here are a few more tricks I use to ensure my prospective clients receive the information they need:

  1. Make your emails less ‘spammy’ – less images, more text, fewer links. Make them more relevant to your clients, and avoid getting unsubscribes.
  2. Get a proper domain – emails from @gmail.com or @hotmail.com addresses are going to bounce a lot more than they will if you register your own domain.
  3. A redirect page – a simple web page which will appear immediately after they hit ‘submit’. Here, you can warn them that they might need to check their junk mail.
  4. An auto responder – this is a short email that can go out immediately after they hit ‘submit’. This immediately gives them something to look for, when you’re telling them to check their junk and add you to their safe senders list.
  5. Ask for a mobile number in your contact form – this way, if they do ghost you, you can follow up with a text.

I am willing to bet you’ve been putting this off for months because the terminology was mind-boggling, and the StudioNinja help article was overly complicated.

Right? If so, please share this blog with your friends so that they can fix theirs too!

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