Email marketing and blog marketing – A quick tip!

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.