Avoiding the Spam Filters and Email Marketing Tips

Email marketing as many of us know, can be a powerful and inexpensive method of reaching our most active potential and/or existing customers. It can boost not only our direct sales, but also our credibility and referrals.

Jared’s Leads will give you the opportunity to include your current customer email databases within your email campaign deployment as well as selected from targeted opt-in email databases offer by Jared’s Leads to expand your product/service offerings.

One of the major benefits of email marketing is that email is “postage” free, but obviously this is the same reason that spam has become so popular and so frustrating worldwide. With spam comes spam filters and with spam filters comes the blocking of legitimate email.

In this article Jared’s Leads will describe the basic steps you can take to help reduce the number of emails you send out that get blocked by spam filters — hopefully resulting in a more rewarding marketing effort.

The right selection of words

Many spam filters work by analyzing the email based on its content and the words used. Many words — such as free, sex and so forth — are very heavy spam trigger keywords. Jared’s Leads can run a spam word check before email deployment to help you avoid a high spam rating. Your priority should be to avoid such words while keeping your newsletter as professional as possible.

Later in this article Jared’s Leads will show you a technique that we use to help us detect words that could trigger spam filters that I may have missed.

Pay attention to your formatting

When formatting your email, keep it simple and professional. Excessive use of different colors, fonts, sizes, images and so forth will result in a higher spam-filtering rate. Keep your email as clean as possible, and try to stick to a maximum of 2 or 3 different font types and sizes. Overly large sized fonts will surely add to an email being flagged as spam, as will too many images (or not enough text).

Try and use a short and simple style sheet rather than using font tags excessively. Most spam filters don’t appreciate a multitude of font tags and inline formatting, and the more primitive filters can’t detect style sheets so they will not penalize as easily.

Consistency is KING!

Use a template if you plan on sending newsletters consistently. This will make sure that all your newsletters look and feel the same. It will also add a touch of professionalism and branding to your newsletters.

Whilst not directly affecting spam filters, this will enable your readers to distinguish your newsletter instantly, thus not reporting it as spam accidentally. Some spam filters work by querying a spam server, whereas others report individual emails as spam. If your email gets reported as spam, then more than likely multiple spam filters will flag your email.

Being consistent with your timing of the newsletter also helps. For example, if you send a newsletter once per month (We don’t recommend you send out any more than this, unless you’ve got something really interesting to say), then aim to send it out at the same time, on the same day each month.

Once again, your potential readers will learn to expect your email, adding professionalism and often improving open rates, also reducing accidental spam flagging as well.

Always use Double Opt-in

Always make your contact lists double opt-in. This means that when a user subscribes to your contact list, they will be sent an email with a link that they must click on to confirm their subscription.

This is very important because many people can accidentally enter an incorrect email address, or even the email address of someone else on purpose. When that person receives a newsletter they did not subscribe to, they will assume they have been spammed, and your newsletter (and possibly your web server) will be reported as spam.

Unsubscribe and Contact Information

Every newsletter you send out should contain a way for the reader to unsubscribe. Jared’s Leads always includes the unsubscribe link at the bottom of email campaigns. Not doing so is illegal in some countries and is an instant sign of spamming. You should also display your contact information (Phone, Fax and Address) clearly, as this greatly increases confidence in your email and your company, as well as conforms to spam laws in the United States. Contact information also allows a potential customer to contact you if need be.

Test, Test, Test

The key to avoiding spam filters is testing. The first method of testing I use is to send the newsletter to multiple email accounts with existing spam filters. For example, we have a Gmail (http://www.gmail.com) account and a Hotmail (http://www.hotmail.com) account that we make sure we send my newsletter to. If the newsletter ends up in the junk folder, then we got some work to do.

We also have a couple of email accounts with different web hosts that have spam filters in place. In particular, they mostly use spam assassin — a popular piece of spam filtering software. Spam assassin is useful because every email that it flags as spam is given a report and a list of why that email was considered spam.

We also have a local spam filtering application, that runs a local copy of spam assassin. It acts as a very close replica to the same software used on thousands of servers’ worldwide. By sending myself copies of the newsletter using the spam assassin checking techniques — gives me feedback as to why my email may have been flagged. If I’ve used words or formatting that I shouldn’t have, or if I’ve included too many images, etc.

Conclusion

Avoiding spam filters when sending out legitimate newsletters can be a time consuming effort. However, as your contact list grows, it can also be a very beneficial exercise. I’ve watched open rates of just 2 to 3% soar to a massive 50% and over, simply by applying the techniques described in this article.

Please contact info@JaredsLeads.com with any questions or leave your comments below. 866-LEADS-88