If you want your marketing emails to work, they need to actually REACH the people you send them to. After all, the best marketing message in the world won’t work if no one receives it.
This means your marketing emails need to be written, designed and sent in such a way that they are not wrongly mistaken for spam, by the various spam filters out there. Avoiding spam filters is a huge subject, but you can quickly learn many of the things to avoid – simply by doing the following……
Read the emails in your junk mail filter
Take a look at the emails that have been caught in your spam filter and you will find that they all fit into 1 of 2 categories:
1. Emails from spammers, which were correctly detected as spam.
2. Legitimate email from people, which was wrongly detected as spam.
In both cases, the reason these emails were detected as spam is usually because of the way they were written, designed or sent. There were things about those emails, that your spam filter thought was suspicious enough to merit them being blocked. You need to look for some of the common factors and where these blocked emails differ from those you received, which were not blocked.
Common email marketing mistakes
There are a large number of things that can lead to an email being regarded as spam, from; using terms like ‘click here’ inside the email to the over-use of exclamation marks!!!!
The use of a graphics within the email can also cause problems, as can things like having too many upper-case letters in the subject line of the email.
Sadly, you can send a perfectly crafted email to your readers and STILL have it blocked – simply because someone using the same mailhost and within your ip range is a spammer. Without you doing anything wrong, your ip address then gets blacklisted.
These are just a few of the things you need to look out for. You will find lots more when you start to examine the emails that get caught in your spam filter.
So, what kind of things have YOU noticed that cause emails to be wrongly detected as spam – let us know.