Introduction

Using the full range of Lofty features, such as Property Alerts, Market Reports, Welcome Emails, and Smart Plans, will naturally result in sending large volumes of emails to your lead database. As email volume increases, so does the risk of deliverability issues such as spam filtering, bounced emails, or phishing warnings.

This guide outlines the most common email deliverability challenges and best practices to ensure your messages consistently reach your leads’ inboxes.

Avoid Emails Being Marked as Spam

• General Suggestions
• Content Best Practices
• Lofty-Specific Suggestions
• Our commitment at Lofty

Spam filtering is common across all email service providers. Each platform has its own algorithms and criteria, which means even legitimate emails may occasionally land in spam.

First of all, it is important to note that having emails marked as spam is very common in email marketing. Many email service providers have different filtering criteria to eventually consider emails as spam. Although the set criteria is reasonable, there will always be flaws in which emails are flagged as spam incorrectly. We’ve all been there... waiting on that important email only to discover it in the spam folder days later!

Why Emails Get Marked as Spam

Common triggers include:

• Recipients marking your emails as spam

• Low open rates

• Spam-trigger words in subject or body (e.g., “amazing,” “free,” “promise you”)

• High bounce rates

• Lack of a physical address in the email body

• Poor HTML structure or image-heavy templates

Even with Lofty’s strong sending reputation, you can significantly influence your personal deliverability by following the guidance below.

General Suggestions

(1) Ask Leads to Add You as a Contact

This improves your sending reputation and helps inbox placement.

(2) Ask Leads to Mark Your Emails as “Not Spam.”

If an email lands in spam, have them open the message and click “Report not spam.”

(3) Ask Leads to Add Your Sending Email Address to Their Address Book

Especially helpful for new Lofty accounts using a new sending email address. As an example, this is how it is done in Gmail settings when accessing from a specific email:

(4) Gmail Users: Create Filters to Never Mark Your Emails as Spam

Encourage Gmail users to build a filter guaranteeing inbox delivery.

(5) Regularly Remove Disengaged or Invalid Contacts

Inactive or fake emails harm your reputation. Gmail and other providers monitor your open rate—continuously sending emails to unengaged leads increases the likelihood of future messages going to spam.

(6) Limit Bulk Emails

Send newsletters or blast emails in multiple smaller batches when possible.

Lofty recommends:

• Only 1–3 automated emails per week per lead (including alerts and reports)

(7) Avoid Heavy Blast Campaigning Without Engagement

Sending large amounts of email without positive engagement can immediately decrease your sender reputation.

(8) Avoid “Spammy” Content

Use online spam-checker tools to evaluate your subject lines and body content.

(9) Limit Images and Use Mostly Text

A higher text-to-image ratio improves deliverability. Plain-text emails tend to perform best.

 

Important Reminder

Your reputation is influenced by:

• Quality & relevance of your emails

• Frequency of sends

• Keeping your list clean of non-engagers

In general, if leads seldom open or reply to your emails or report them as spam, your email reputation will decline. If your email reputation declines enough, your email address can be marked as spam. You will want to make sure you are (a) sending good quality/engaging emails, (b) at the recommended frequency (see above), and (c) making sure to remove people from your distribution list who are not opening your emails. 

Content Best Practices

Based on our experience, email content plays a very important role in delivering your emails to a lead's inbox. Below are some email content suggestions that can be followed to improve email deliverability:

(1) Avoid using spam trigger words. Email service providers will use spam filters before delivering your email to a recipient's inbox. Most spam filters will scan your email content to find "suspicious words" such as "100%," "free," "earn money," "guaranteed," "promotion," etc. If these kinds of words reach a certain level, your emails will be marked as spam and will not be sent to the lead's inbox. So, an in-depth review of all email content especially the email subject is very important.

(2) Avoid sending emails that only contain images. When you set up your email templates, make sure that your content has a good balance between text and images. For most spam filters, if the Text-to-HTML is too low, email providers will mark your emails as spam. So, if you want to insert a lot of images into the body of your email, make sure to add enough text to have a good balance. Also, be aware that many email recipients will block all of the images in the email body by default. 

(3) Send valuable content. At the core of any successful email program is a commitment to sending valuable and interesting content to your recipients. Every time you send an email that does not resonate with the person receiving it, the likelihood that your recipient will open or click your next email decreases. This, in turn, leads to a higher likelihood of having emails land in spam. So, it is important to treat your email campaigns as an extension of your brand to always work on delivering useful content to those who receive your emails.

Lofty-Specific Suggestions

Brand-New Lofty Sending Email Addresses

New accounts start with a brand-new sending address. Sending high volumes too early is a fast way to damage reputation. Warm up gradually.

Recommendations

1. Welcome Emails.   
   • Send Welcome Emails first, not mass marketing emails.
   • Do NOT send too many at once.
   • Prioritize your most engaged or hot leads.
      

• Sending Frequency. 
  • Property Alerts: Set to weekly for the first 1-2 months, and then you can adjust to be 2-3 times a week on a case-by-case basis as you interact with your clients. These do have to be managed individually for each lead.
  • Market Snapshots: Set to weekly for the first 1-2 months, and then you can adjust to 2-3 times a week on a case-by-case basis as you interact with your clients. These do have to be managed individually for each lead.
  • Mass Email: Do not send too many mass emails in one day. Lofty will limit the number that can be sent at once to 200 emails, but you will want to avoid sending 200 mass emails multiple times in one day.
  • Smart Plan Emails: Do not auto-apply too many Smart Plans during the first 1-2 months. Consider only manually assigning Smart Plans to leads that you know for a fact need specific content at that time.

• Lead Import. 

  Best practices:

  • Do NOT import more than ~5,000 leads at once

  • Do NOT auto-trigger emails in the first 1–2 months

  • If importing large numbers, spread uploads every few days

  • Avoid sending Welcome Emails to all imported leads at once

• Whitelist / Safe Sender / Not Junk or Spam. Send emails to trusted clients/leads that you communicate with regularly and have them add your sending email address to their whitelist/contacts in their email application. When done as a new Lofty user within the first 1-2 months, your email reputation will improve drastically. If the email goes to Spam (which can happen when an email is sent from a newly-created email address), work with these same leads to find those emails and mark them as safe/not spam.

Our Commitment at Lofty

• We monitor our domain and IP reputation every single day, and our performance is guaranteed by Amazon. Our reputation is listed as good by Amazon, so our IP is not blacklisted.
• We send millions of emails to our customers every day and plan to continue to do so as effectively as possible.
• We have a solid reputation associated with our service and will seek to maintain and always improve this reputation
• We will continue to run our service in compliance with ESPs and will be sure to follow their suggestions of separating IPs, sending frequency, etc.

Phishing and Unsafe Emails

There have been some Lofty users who have noticed phishing email warnings when receiving one of their own emails (as if they were a lead) sent from their own email address to their G-Suite account. In other words, they sent test property alerts, etc., to themselves and received a phishing warning that looks like the following:

This particular warning should only be populated in Gmail due to the fact that the sending email address is similar to the same domain that is receiving the email. If you review the article Email Sending Address > (2b) A New Domain Similar to your Personal Domain, you will notice that the similar domain is done intentionally. This warning should only appear if you are receiving your own emails. 
 

Be sure that you or anyone in your organization clicks on the Looks Safe hyperlink so that this does not affect your email reputation.

Questions?

If you have any questions regarding this topic or any others, please reach out to our Support Team via email at <support@lofty.com>, by phone at 1 (855) 981-7557, or by chat with us through your Lofty CRM. 

Related terms: spam, bounced emails, opt-in probationary period