If you use email or blogging to market your services, I believe you will find the following information really useful.
It’s all about the importance of avoiding certain words or phrases in your emails and blog posts, which could get them blocked from reaching your readers.
Whilst there are many different things that can lead to an email getting trapped in someone’s junk mail or spam filters, I’m going to focus on just one of them; the words you use in your blog titles and your email subject lines.
What does blog marketing have to do with email filters?
Many people subscribe to blogs via email. For instance, around 40% of this blog’s RSS subscribers read it via email. So, if the title of one of my posts contains words or phrases that email filters are looking out for, there’s a good chance the post will get trapped in either the readers junk mail folder or it may never reach them at all.
I wrote a post last Friday, which had a title that was essentially a “toxic” phrase. The title was “REVEALED: The fast rack to wealth.” You can see the post here. It also had the opening word written in caps, which is another, lesser, junk mail trigger.
I was curious to see how many people opened it, compared to an average post. There was a drop of around 25%, pretty much what I had expected.
So, whilst it’s a great idea to use blog titles that will capture people’s attention – you need to also ensure that your titles are email friendly (if you offer the option for people to subscribe via email, which I believe you should.)
Email marketing and filters
Titles are also a key element in getting your marketing emails and newsletters past filters and in front of your readers. On my marketing newsletter, I opt for a very simple title: The Jim Connolly Newsletter. Keeping this very basic title format does 2 clever things.
- Because it’s familiar, it immediately alerts my readers that the newsletter has arrived. If I used different titles every time, it would be harder for my newsletter to get noticed for what it is.
- It contains nothing that’s likely to get trapped in a junk mail filter.
As I said earlier, there are a number of things, which can lead to your marketing email’s getting trapped in filters. Here’s a simple email marketing tip, from one of my first blog posts.
I would like to know what you think about this. Please share your experiences.
Photo: Brian Giesen
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Hi Jim,
Really useful and didn’t thought too much about it since now.
I also think it’s a really great idea not to change the title of your e-mail newsletter each time you send it. Right now, when I’m sending my newsletter the title of the e-mail is the title of the article: and if I think it the way you put it, indeed it can be a problem with the branding.
Thanks for the tip
Toma – Optimizing The Web´s last blog ..Custom Search Forces You to Know Where Do You Rank Well
Hi Toma. Glad you found it useful, sir!
Dear, Jim C.
This is so so true and many folks out there don’t even have an Idea of this however You have made it very freaking clear & easy to visualize too!
You are seriously the best when it comes to web marketing advise Thank You for letting Us learn from You at such a steady pace!
Ps.. Thanks once again!
Norman Flecha
Straight Talk
Thanks Norman. I always try to avoid buzzwords and making things over-complicated.
I never truly thought about this, of course, I don’t have that many email subscribers to any of my various blogs. That may be my fault
Matches Malone´s last blog ..Maybe Selecting Team #13 Wasn’t Such a Good Idea
Thanks for the feedback ‘Matches! I have a significant percentage of email subscribers, because I promote that version of subscribing quite proactively. Check the BIG, white box on the right. I find it extremely useful to have a wide spread of email-based subscribers – something I shall blog about at a later date.
Thanks for this. I’m just getting into email marketing and this is a great tip! I seem to have a problem with open rates and titles…
Corey Freeman´s last blog ..The Quest for Time Management Continues! The Replacement Principle
Hi Corey,
Most of the email marketing programs I have used are extremely poor at delivering accurate readings, when it comes to ‘open rates’. Many give false positives and others fail to spot correctly opened emails. It’s not an exact science. I suggest you check response rates to your offers and click through to dedicated landing pages on your sites. That’s something, which is far easier to read and will give you a good idea, how many people are responding to your email marketing.
Hope that helps.
How can you tell how many people open an emailed blog post? That’s not Feedburner, is it?
Ari Herzog´s last blog ..Top 70 Commentators in January 2010
My bad Ari – I was referring to the reach numbers. They were 25% down, suggesting fewer people reacted to that particular email than any other sent on the same day, from the same blog. Hope that makes sense.
Good tips, Jim! My spam filter has grabbed many things in the past. Sometimes it grabs from people who have been approved for a long time just on the basis of the subject line content. It also grabs plenty of “topic” titles.
As a resume writer, I often caution clients that their name is the best e-mail address that they can have. It looks professional and it reduces the possibility that their important e-mails can be caught in filters. Cute names and numbers in the e-mail address are another reason spam filters grab them. When you launch an e-mail campaign, I am guessing that having a clean e-mail address of your own would also help to get things to their destination.
Julie | Resume Services´s last blog ..Plan Ahead or Prepare to Fail
Hi Julie. It’s less to do with a ‘clean’ email address and more to do with a clean IP address, from your mailhost.
Here’s a very basic and brief example.
When an email provider (yahoo for example) sees someone sending spam to their users, one of the things they can do is to block that senders IP address from accessing it’s servers.
If your email provider has another user, who is sending out spam, and your IP address is the same as the spammers, your emails will also get blocked.
It would be great if someone knows of a webpage/post somewhere, which explains this in a bit more detail.
Hope that makes sense.
Informative. Will keep this in mind once I start pushing out my blog via email.
Michael Locke´s last blog ..3 Ways to Improve Conversions on Your Website