Email Marketing Tips: How Do I Avoid SPAM Filters?

When any business is writing its email marketing campaign, part of its goals are to ensure that the emails you send are received and read by the intended recipients. As we all know in this digital age, every inbox is inundated with email messages from both people we want to hear from and those that we don't.

In order to cut down on receiving email that we don't want we set up SPAM lists of users, words, phrases and other key factors on our desktops and laptops not only do we as individuals do this but also our Internet Service Providers (ISP) have their own master lists, so Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo and AOL pre filter our email before it reaches our inbox.

This is a list of some of the not so obvious words and phrases that won't pass through the standard SPAM filters:

• Free!
• Special
• Golf
• Airport
• Opportunity
• Tennis
• Football
• Team
• Hire
• Complimentary
• Adventure
• Restaurant
• Debt Free
• Celebration
• Garden
• TV
• Holiday
•...and of course the list of course goes on and on!

So how do you avoid your carefully planned and executed email marketing campaign ending up in the junk or SPAM folder?

Spend some time planning your goals for each email marketing campaign; a sales email will have a different set of results to a newsletter, as your readership will expect to see different things. Think carefully about how you word your subject line as this is what will initially make the difference between a read and not read email.

For instance don't say "Fantastic not to be missed once in a lifetime free offer"

You could say "Dear (insert their first name) we have a special offer available for you"

Spend time on wording your email marketing content, be careful to make sure that your content matches your readers expectation, a newsletter is generally meant to be informative not a sales message.

When you have prepared your email, get it professionally checked against known SPAM filters (commonly known as pre-send SPAM testing), and should it fail, spend some time looking at why it failed and how you can best improve this and future email campaigns.

Below are some useful tips and hints that could start to make a difference to the results of your email marketing campaigns.

Use professionally designed HTML emails with well written content and code.
Don't forget to title your email.
Spelling and grammar are very important when writing to clients whether digitally or not.
Don't just send images; make sure to add some text.
If you are using HTML code when sending your email makes sure that you always send a plain text version.