I have a couple 1000 user signups to my app (https://recall.wiki). Whenever I try emailing these user about app updates my emails land up in promotions folder or worse in spam. I use Sendgrid but have also tried SendInBlue. I have tried all the generally recommended techniques to prevent this like minimal html, only 1 link per email, keeping it short, etc. but it still doesn't work. Has anyone else experienced this? Maybe my email got a bad reputation somehow or do you just need to pay for a dedicated IP from the sending provider?

It's mostly your domain, not the service that you need to do some work on. What typically you need to do: 1. Create a new domain (maybe like recallapp.wiki or recallinfo.wiki or something) 2. Warm up the domain a. Do not immediately send out 1000 emails from a fresh domain, you will get put to spam. b. Send 5-10 emails a day for weeks or even a month. There are services that can do this for you. 3. Try sending out emails over a period of time in small chunks, again, not all at once. On top of what you stated, we do these steps and it works for us. I’m assuming its step #2 you skipped. It's also hard to get out of google/others marking you as spam once you do. So you may have to rotate through these steps once you get marked as spam.

Okay thanks for the info. I will try this. What service do you use to send out the emails over a period of time ?

Also find a .com domain for emails

+1 to the the above. I believe woodpecker is a cheap service that gives you that control over emails.

Okay I never thought of the domain thing being a problem, but its a good point. I will try these things out. Thanks for the advice, I have spent so much time trying to get this right so hoping that this will get it working .

Promotions tab is for all email promoting a business, product or service (all marketing email fall into this category) and the primary tab is for personal email by Gmail’s definition for the tabs. Promotions is not punishment. Landing in Spam is a different thing and something you’d want to try and rectify. https://blog.kickbox.com/email-deliverability-unfiltered-gmail-tabs/

I have lots of other companies' news letters and product updates come into my primary tab. In my experience, most mail that lands in promotions doesn't get opened.

@Paul Richards I would check out GMass. It allows you to “warm-up” email addresses so they don’t end up in a spam folder. They have some extensive guides around it too.

@Paul Richards in addition to what others have added, setup email domain authentication for your domain. This requires your sending service to support it but most should. See the following example for MailChimp: https://mailchimp.com/en-au/help/set-up-email-domain-authentication/

Hi all, I just wanted to say this is a useful thread! We are having the same issues. I used a spam checker service to first evaluate what was happening to my emails - if you haven't done so already it's quite useful.

Mailchimp, for all its faults, has always worked for me in terms of deliverability

Outbound to your own email list? Totes different than SDR-sitting-in-outreach cold outbound at volume goal Is your deep tech (spf/dkim/DMARC, sender score, blacklist situation) aligned and on point? Is your shallow tech (multiple domains with multiple email outboxes fed into a centralized place to monitor responses, warming, seed testing) 100% legit?