Ways To Avoid Being Flagged As SPAM
SPAM filters are becoming a serious problem for legitimate email marketers. Spam filters may inadvertently flag your commercial emails as they step up their efforts to block unwanted mail.
Did You Know?
40% of all email sent in 2006 was considered SPAM.
Although spam is causing problems for many email marketers, avoiding the spam filters, or being accidentally flagged as spam by a reader, is not difficult if you follow some simple guidelines,
- Use a double opt-in mailing list. This involves sending a confirmation email in order to get the reader's permission to add them to your mailing database. This will prevent unjust accusations of sending unsolicited emails by ensuring that you do in fact have the subscriber's permission.
- NEVER rent an email list. This is extremely important. If someone has never heard of you, has had no previous interactions with you, and has not request any information from you, then you are spamming them. It doesn't matter how much you paid for the list or how reputable the company that sold you the list is, you are sending spam, plain and simple.
- Tell your visitors to whitelist your domain or add it to their address book once they've signed up for your newsletter. You should also remind new subscribers of this in the welcome email you send.
- Avoid using various phrases or trigger words that are flagged by filters as being spam. You can still use them, but it should be done sparingly. The filters will block your email if it contains too many trigger words. You can find a list of typical trigger words to avoid in your email's subject line and body at www.andreaoneill.com/spamtriggers.html.
- Explain your relationship to the reader. If you don't think the subscriber will recognize your name, the first thing you should include in your email is a sentence that tells them who you are and why you're sending them the email. Say something like, 'You are receiving this email because you signed up to receive periodic news and updates about…' or, 'You are receiving this email because you recently purchased product X from us.'
- Send your email as plain text instead of HTML since the filters tend to block the latter a lot more.
- Before you send your email out to your entire list of readers, perform a dry run on some free email accounts such as hotmail, yahoo, and gmail. Play around with the filter settings on each account and see if your email makes it through. You can also determine if your email is considered high risk of being flagged as spam by running it through a content checker. There are a number of free content checkers available on the Internet, just do a search on Google.
- Finally, you should always follow the CAN-SPAM laws regarding commercial email. This includes items such as containing the mailing address of the company or person sending the message as well as containing an unsubscribe link in every email. The CAN-SPAM act can be found at www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/canspam.htm.
