Posted by Aimee Cozza on June 19th, 2019

A constant complaint that we have is that website contact form submissions go to spam folders, and then no one ever sees them, and clients think that business owners are ignoring them. While there’s not a whole lot we can do if your email provider is preventing you from getting contact form submissions in the first place (Looking at you GoDaddy), there are a few steps you can take to ensure that your contact form submissions never end up in the spam folder.

Ensure you are not sending to yourself

One surefire way to trip a spam filter is to send an email to yourself. If you’re using a contact form plugin, ensure that the to and from address are not identical, preventing you from sending emails to yourself and landing in the spam folder.

Whitelist the sender

When we set up a contact form, often we will set up the send from address to be “wordpress@domain.com” making it easy for website owners to whitelist the sender of these. If you have a special address set up for contact form submissions like this (other common ones are “do-not-reply@domain.com” or even “info@domain.com”) simply whitelist the sending address by adding it to your contact list.

Create a filter

Filtering out contact form submissions can help keep your inbox tidy and also keep contact forms out of spam. Create a filter that either recognizes the subject line or the send from address and dumps it into a special folder (or perhaps marks it as important in your inbox) before the spam filter gets to it.

Avoid spammy words and phrases

Spammers like to use phrases like “contact form” and “submission”, so avoiding subject lines like that will help you keep your contact form out of the spam folder. Here are some ideas for some programmatic subject lines you can use:

• [Website title] Lead from [Customer email or name]
• New Lead/Message from [Customer email or name]
• [Customer email or name] has a question or message for you
• … Or have the customer decide their own subject line!

How do you keep your contact form submissions out of the spam folder? Let us know in the comments below!