Email Deliverability: Why Your Media Pitch Goes to Spam and How To Fix It

You’ve spent hours crafting the perfect media pitch and compiling a bang-on press list—only to hear crickets. No replies, no coverage. Just radio silence. 👀

You now have a sneaking suspicion that your email might have ended up in your targets’ spam folders. 

With most of us getting strings of emails every day, spam filters have become increasingly strict. Small mistakes—like using the wrong wording, having the wrong authentication, or emailing too many contacts at once—can instantly undo your best efforts. These errors can also affect the rest of your company’s emails, lowering deliverability across the board and hurtin your email deliverability rates.

Worse still, you may not even realize it’s happening. The problem may have crept in when you started sending emails to more recipients, and now you’ve crossed the threshold that sets the alarms ringing. A high volume of emails can often trigger spam filters, affecting your sender reputation. Spam complaints can also contribute to lowering your deliverability rates, making it harder to get your emails to the inbox.

Need help getting past those pesky spam filters? Whether you’re a PR pro or still learning the ropes, this guide on email deliverability will give you the answers you seek when it comes to sending out PR or marketing emails.

Why Are My Media Pitches Ending Up in Spam?

Let’s start by looking at some of the biggest spam filter triggers. If your emails keep getting treated like rubbish, there’s a clear lineup of “usual suspects” to watch out for:

Stricter email security

In February 2024, Google and Yahoo implemented new measures to combat email scams and improve security. These measures include a stricter DMARC (Domain-Based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance) policy that requires senders to authenticate emails.  

Need to hear this in plain English? Think of it like this: Gmail and Yahoo Mail have added a checkpoint for incoming emails. Only messages with the right ID—a verified digital signature—get through. If your emails aren’t properly authenticated, they could be blocked or flagged as spam. 

If you’re sending emails from a company server that doesn’t automatically authenticate them, you may have found the reason why your media pitches are ending up in journalists’ spam folders. 

Smarter spam filters

Spam filters are getting smarter by the day, using more sophisticated machine learning algorithms to sort legitimate emails from junk. 

This increased sensitivity means that email content that contains everything from formatting errors to excessive use of capital letters or weak subject lines can land your email in spam. To overcome this last problem, read our article on how to write subject lines.

Also make sure your emails and subject lines avoid common “spammy” phrases or wording, including:

• Salesy vocab, like “limited offer,” “free,” and “bonus.”
• Financial spam words, like “bargain,” “credit,” and “discount.”
• Urgency and pressure words, like “act now,” “final deadline,” or even just “urgent.”
• Anything in ALL CAPS.

Sending too many emails

Sending too many emails too fast? This is another guaranteed way to raise the spam filters’ hackles. Your sender score could also take a hit, making it harder for your emails to land in inboxes.

Likewise, if you send an email to a long list of brand-new recipients, your account may be marked as suspicious. This is one good reason why targeted pitching beats mass emailing.

If your emails get flagged for bulk mailing practices, the webmail service might throttle or suspend your account’s sending capabilities. It’s important to keep their sender guidelines in mind before pressing the send button. 

Unreliable open rates

For many PR professionals, open rates (i.e., the number of emails that get opened) have traditionally been a proxy for email deliverability rates. Unfortunately, relying on this metric is no longer a good idea.

Open rates rely on invisible tracking pixels embedded in your email to determine whether it has been opened. Due to security concerns, many email providers now use practices that block open tracking. This includes pre-downloading images and the “hidden pixel,” which marks the email as opened even if the recipient hasn’t viewed it. 

The result? It may look like people are engaging with your emails when, in fact, they’re being completely ignored. And if engagement with your emails is low, your sender reputation can take a hit, which increases the chances that your future media pitches get flagged as spam.

The bottom line is that relying on open rates as a metric for email deliverability isn’t a good idea.

Attachments

Attaching PDFs, images, or videos to your email pitch is a fast track to the spam folder. 

Many email filters flag large attachments as a potential security risk—the bigger the file, the higher the chances your email won’t get through. This is a significant challenge for PR professionals, as visual content makes for strong pitches.

Fortunately, there are smarter ways to send your recipients visual assets and other large files, ensuring they arrive in their inboxes along with the rest of your material.

Sending to too many “bounced” contacts

If you’re sending emails to addresses that no longer exist (or never did), take note: This is another surefire way to get your account throttled. The more emails that “bounce,” the more likely this scenario becomes.

This is a common problem that affects email delivery when using quick hacks to obtain email lists, like buying bulk lists, using prospecting tools to find addresses based on social media profiles, or using old lists from past campaigns. At best, those lists are outdated. At worst, many of the email addresses they include are simply made up. 

Additionally, if your list includes too many inactive subscribers, your engagement rates will drop, further damaging your sender reputation. Regular list cleaning is essential to maintain a healthy delivery rate and improve inbox placement rate.

In either case, sloppy practices lead to high bounce rates, which hurts your sender reputation and increases the risk of your emails being relegated to spam. To ensure your pitches reach the right journalists, you must regularly verify and update your media list to avoid any negative impact on your outreach efforts.

How To Get Your Media Pitch Into Journalists’ Inboxes

Now that you have a long laundry list of what can go wrong, you might be wondering how to overcome these obstacles to improve email delivery. Let’s take a look.

Use an authenticated email domain

Even when you use email service providers like Gmail and Outlook, you still need to set up your Domain Name System (DNS) and DMARC records and ensure these are synced up with any other email tools your company uses.    

This is also the case if you’re using an in-house email service. You’ll need to double-check that your emails are sent out with the appropriate authentication. You can check this using tools like EasyDMARC or ask your IT team to assist.

Another option is to use dedicated PR software, like PR.co. We assist our customers in verifying their email domains, ensuring their DMARC is correctly configured, and working directly with your IT team to set everything up. 

Warm up your email account before sending bulk pitches

“Warming up” a new email account means sending a small number of emails and gradually increasing the volume. By initially sending and receiving responses from a few email addresses, you slowly build up your account’s reputation, which helps with future deliverability. 

Note that the warm-up process can take anything from a few weeks to a couple of months to reach peak deliverability. So don’t rush things. 

Once your account is fully warmed up, you can start sending larger email batches without triggering spam filters as easily. 

Maintaining “list hygiene” 

Regularly reviewing media lists and removing invalid or non-responsive email addresses can reduce bounce rates and ensure your reputation stays in the green. 

You can also verify email addresses before sending, using tools like Mails.so to ensure your emails don’t go to spam.

Another way of avoiding a poor sender reputation is to implement double opt-ins to ensure that your recipients genuinely want to receive your emails.

Maintaining good practices like list hygiene can significantly improve your inbox placement rate, helping your emails land where they belong—right in the recipient’s primary inbox.

Bonus tip: Instead of buying a press list, for a hefty price, here's how you can build one yourself for free. 

Smart outreach practices

Many PR professionals have a list of best practices they apply to cold outreach and prospecting campaigns. These typically include:

• Personalizing pitches. Copy-paste pitches that feel automated—and look like spam—are likely to be ignored. Make sure your email message is targeting the recipient.
• Targeting the right journalists based on their interests and the topics they typically cover.
• Including a strong hook, a value proposition, and a call to action. 
• Writing a compelling subject line that’s not spammy. 

As a PR professional, you know that crafting a successful pitch usually involves much more, but sticking to these basics is a good starting point. They’ll help you to steer clear of the spam filters as well.

Avoid attachments

As noted before, email attachments can interfere with deliverability. To circumvent this issue, send your targets a link to images hosted in a Google Drive or Dropbox folder or embed a thumbnail with a link to the full-sized image.

Better still, host your assets in an online newsroom like PR.co’s platform and direct your media contacts here. This way, the journalists on your pitch list can access everything they need—press releases, high-resolution images, videos, sound clips, and brand assets—from one central repository. 

IT’s also worth noting that, unlike many other tools, PR.co enables easy access to the data. Say goodbye to expiring links or recipients needing to create their own accounts.

Include an unsubscribe link

One often overlooked factor affecting email deliverability is the lack of a visible unsubscribe link. If recipients can’t easily opt out, they might mark your email as spam instead, increasing spam complaints and harming your reputation.

Meaningful metrics and feedback

Even though open rates are no longer reliable, there are still plenty of email metrics worth tracking. Email responses, click-through rates, and the usage of materials shared are all fantastic measures of success. 

It’s also worth asking for feedback from your most trusted media contacts. In many instances, these contacts can provide a fresh perspective on the factors that resonated with them, what piqued their journalistic interest, and typical reasons why they may leave certain emails unread.

If you’re still building up a list of media contacts, check out our Media Relations guide for information on how to increase your odds of success.

Boost Email Deliverability With PR.co

Authenticating your email, following PR pitch best practices, and avoiding common spam triggers are all key tactics to improve the deliverability of your email campaigns. 

However, for many PR pros, it’s easier to rely on a robust PR platform that understands the industry's best practices that does the heavy lifting for them.

PR.co offers software for ambitious PR teams that includes tools to send pitches, press releases, and company news to your contacts without a glitch. Our easy-to-use platform includes all the most useful email deliverability features so you can focus on the pitch itself.

During our onboarding process, we’ll up your email domain, do all the necessary checks to ensure DMARC verification is set up correctly, connect your domain to an already warmed-up IP address, and continue to assist you while using the platform. We’ll also put you on a separate sending domain, so there’s less risk of your spam filter hiccups negatively affecting the rest of the business and your domain reputation.

More good news is that our software is fully equipped for bulk sending. The platform ensures that large sendouts don’t simultaneously reach recipients’ email servers. As a result, throttling is prevented, and bounces are handled accordingly. Recipients are also directed to your newsroom content instead of having to deal with bulky attachments.  

Ready to stop your emails from disappearing into the void? Let’s chat.