So you have created your email campaign, inserted your text and images and now you have sent a PROOF email to yourself to double check everything’s correct before you send it out. But it doesn’t arrive. So you hit "Send & Receive" frantically hoping the email will be pulled magically into your inbox and still nothing.
Junk?
Maybe something caused the email to go into your junk or spam folder, so this would be your first port of call. If this has been placed into your junk folder then something in the email content has caused this. This could be something in the subject line or the email content itself. Make sure you don’t have too much content in CAPITALS, any typical trigger phrases like "Buy now" or "Great Opportunity", or too many exclamation marks!!!! Any of these factors are likely to cause your email to be marked as spam. Having trouble?
It was fine last month?
Try looking at your previous email campaign to see the difference between the email content and the subject line; it might be some of the content in either of these that is causing the email to be blocked.
Change the subject
So my first recommendation would be to change the subject line, maybe remove any words you think could be spammy and send another test email. If this fails to arrive again then change the subject line to something completely different and send another test. If this arrives then you now know which words are causing the email to be blocked.
Something in the content
Earlier in this blog we mentioned trigger phrases and sometimes it can be a combination of two or three small factors that can add up and give you a total "score" that tips you over the threshold of your email filter settings, causing it to land in your junk mail box. If you are happy that your email’s content doesn't appear to contain any trigger phrases then we would advise saving a copy of the campaign and taking each paragraph out of the content until you can figure out what might be causing the email to be marked as junk email. This is where NewZapp's 'Save As' function really helps for quick duplication and testing.
Is it just your email address that’s not receiving?
Try sending the email to an alternate address, to see if this works, as the problem might be local to your account. For example, if the from address is also set to your email address, your mail server might be blocking the email as it will detect that the email has been sent from a different server to your regular internal mail. Alternatively change the from address and try sending again.
So to summarise;
If you have received test emails before with no problems, then by a process of elimination outlined above, you should be able to pin down the reason why the email is being blocked before it reaches your inbox.
If you have never managed to successfully receive a test email before, then it would be worth speaking to your I.T. team to make sure our servers are white listed or marked as safe, as it could be that emails to your server are being held in 'Quarantine'.