How many of my Mailchimp emails go to spam?

I received a message from a client as below. I’ve included my response below the question.

I’ve wondered how many of my Mailchimp emails end up in peoples’ spam folders. I had an example of this today from a colleague. He sent me a Mailchimp email that ended up in my spam folder. I know in the past you’ve said that I should expect about 25% opens. Could a large portion of those that don’t open end up in spam folders? Do you have any Mailchimp stats on this?

Unfortunately it isn’t possible to determine how many of your messages go to the spam/junk folder. The email standards don’t allow for this. Technically it would be simple for a small message to be sent to the sending server that a message has been placed in spam/junk but I imagine that this isn’t desirable because of the massive amounts of extra communication this would generate on the Internet each day (there are +- 141 billion spam emails detected per day).

Mailchimp does provide a metric in email marketing reports called ‘Abuse Reports‘ which is fairly accurate measure of how many people have received your email message in their inbox and then have move the message to their spam/junk folder. This doesn’t however include the number of messages that were placed in spam/junk automatically.

Spam filters look for many things to determine if the message is spam. The one single thing you can do that has most chance of reducing the number of your emails that go to spam filters is to authenticate your domain (view details on authenticating your domain)