Do you use email marketing in your company? Or considering email marketing? You should know that, no matter how good your emails are, they might still land in your reader’s inbox. That’s definitely not what we want.

Did you know that your email can land in spam even though nobody reported you? There are specific words in your subject line that can trigger spam filters easily, and without you even knowing it.

Fortunately, there are a few things you can do to make sure your email avoids the dreaded spam filters and one of those things is to request your email address to be whitelisted.

What Is Whitelisting?

Whitelisting, simply put, signals to the email service that the recipient wants to receive emails from a specific mailing address. For obvious reasons, you can’t whitelist your own emails. It has to be done by your recipients, otherwise, no emails would ever land in spam, rendering it useless. However, what you can do is ask your recipients to whitelist your sending address. 📮

Why Should You Ask For Readers To Whitelist Your Email?

By whitelisting your sending address, your recipients are marking your emails as “not spam”, making it possible for any emails that you sent to land in their inbox all the time.

Getting whitelisted will do wonders for your deliverability rate. Not only will you not land in spam, but you’ll always land in the inbox. This contributes to the success of your email campaigns and ensures trust between you and your recipients. 🏃

It also makes sure your subscribers never miss an email. If you have a predefined sequence, this will keep your readers on track as they go down the sales funnel.

How Do You Whitelist An Email

We recommend asking your new subscribers to whitelist your email sending address as soon as they confirm their subscription.

If you pose it as an important step after subscribing (like confirming your email address), your new subscribers will most likely respond in a positive way. When users first subscribe, they will want to make sure they are not missing out, so they’ll whitelist you. You just have to make whitelisting a part of the subscription process.

However, when requesting users to whitelist your email address, there may be some difficulties as each email service provider, and each email client, require certain steps to whitelist each email address.

The best thing to do is to provide these steps somewhere in your content. You can add this to a landing page that says “Thank you for subscribing!”, as an example. Or send an email with a reminder, linking to a page in which you share these steps. Choose whatever option best suits you and your audience. 🎤

Whitelisting In Different Devices & Clients

Apple Mail (OS X and iOS devices)

To whitelist an address on OS X, simply click on the small arrow on the right side of the contact’s name or email address. Then, in that short menu, select “Add to Contacts” or “Add to VIPs”.

These two options are quite similar. The difference is that by adding an email address to VIPs, emails from this address will land in a specific inbox on Apple Mail.
By adding the address to Contacts, the email will also be prioritized, by appearing in the Inbox.

Outlook

When opening an email from a new sender on Outlook.com, you’ll see that the content of the image is usually not displayed correctly. This happens as a security precaution from Outlook. All you need to do is click on “I trust [email address]. Always show content.”

This will whitelist that email address for the recipient.

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Outlook 20XX

On the Outlook app, an email from a new sender comes with a yellow bar at the top saying something like “Click here to download pictures…”. Once again, this is a safety measure from Microsoft. 🪟

Click on the link in that yellow bar. In the drop-down menu, select “Add Sender to Safe Senders List”. And there you go, you’ve whitelisted that sender.

Gmail (webmail)

Whitelisting an address on Gmail’s webmail is easy and fast. If the email shows in one of the secondary boxes, like Promotions, simply drag the email from there into the inbox.

Then, a message will appear stating that “This conversation has been moved to Primary. Do this for all future messages from [email address]?”. Select “Yes:” This whitelists all messages from that sender immediately. 📨

Android (default client)

On Android’s default client, all you have to do is to open the email message, tap on the picture of the sender, and then tap on “Add to contacts”. It literally takes two seconds.

Wrapping Up

As the landscape constantly shifts in digital marketing, email is still a very safe and effective method to keep your readers engaged. Features like whitelisting will not go away in the near future, so it is great to make sure your messages never fall through the cracks. As long as spam exists, there will be a way to protect yourself from it as an email marketing user. 📩

If you use Platformly, we ensure a great deliverability rate. However, there is no such thing as being too careful. Whitelisting is definitely recommended.

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