6 ways to avoid your emails being seen as spam.

Here is a quick list of ways to keep yourself out of spam bin.



1) Warn your new sign ups that they may need to change their filters.

Before someone submits their details to your email subcription box, highlight to them that they may have to set their filters to allow your emails. Once you have regular emails received by them the filter issues seem less likely to misread your emails.

2) Get them to add you as a contact into their contacts folder.

You will need to let them see the exact sent from IP address to that they can add this to their contacts folder and save your name. This should reduce your emails being labelled as SPAM.

3) Don't fill your text with Spam words.

Make sure you write your emails without the hardsell keywords, or without too many single link words. This can be scanned as spam. Google current lists of Spam words as there are loads of articles on this: try this one
http://www.eadm.co.uk/spam-words.html for starters but please look for more to get a better understanding of the types of words.



4) Use images to show filtered words.

If you have to use words like free and special offer, make these into images and place as eyecatchers in your design. Be careful not to label these with the keywords as the meta data in the HTML will still be picked up by the spam filters.


5) Don't use 3rd party link shorteners to track your clicks.

Popular link shorteners like Bit.ly and others act like a tracking cookie. So the browser can see these as being a masked URL. Always try to use the link tracking through your email client. They are more recognised by the browsers.


6) Allow people to unsubscribe easily.

Last on this short list is a promblem that is sometimes overlooked.
If you do not make it easy for people to unsubscribe from your emails then they are more likely to just save time and click the spam button to block you. The more of these your send address receives the worse your performance in emailing. You cannot control your contacts changing their minds after registering.

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Keep your data clean, and clean your data regularly.

You can waste a lot of energy and money by emailing to customers whose data is not cleaned.

Before you send, make sure you know where your email contacts have come from.

Good practice dictates that you should always look to grow your email list organically, from contacts who have signed up directly to you through your site or through your direct marketing and promotional material.

Where possible get them to double opt-in through your email service by. This means that when they sign up and are then prompted to confirm their email sign up online. By opting in twice they show a better level of interest and as long as your content is relevant and interesting, you should be able to market to them more efficiently.

Double opt in also protects you from malicious reporting as a SPAMMER. If someone reports your emails as spam, their double opt-in history can be used to prove they were aware of what you would be emailing. It is always useful to protect your online reputation and this is a good system to use for that reason alone.

 

Only use trusted email lists.

I would caution against the use of 'purchased email lists' or if you are looking to buy email lists from third parties. If a small percentage of these lists report you as spam, you can quickly become blacklisted and unable to send any e-mails from your email client - which impacts on your time and money.

Would you respond well to emails from unknown parties?

Understand that growing email lists happens over a period of time and is the result of a combination of other marketing methods.

Don’t panic if you find people are unsubscribing from your e-mails. They are doing you a favour by

showing you they are not likely to answer your call to actions. As long as they opt out, rather than report

you for SPAM, this will not affect your reputation. It only helps to clean your list of contacts interested

in your e-mails.

Send a yearly 'clean up' email that asks people to update their information and unsubscribe if they no longer wish to receive your emails (though this should always be a link in your email anyway). It's not about how big your list is, but rather about how responsive that list is.

How do you currently store or manage your customer email information?
If you use a CRM database (customer relationship management) who is responsible for making sure the data is correct, are your sales team or colleagues adding in data correctly?
Clean data is a product of everyone's behaviour so try to make sure this is put into practise.

An effective way to clean data is to pull reports showing the least active openers and split test your emails to these lists to see if different content, layout or special offers increase clicks or call to action responses. 

How clean is your data?

Questions to ask yourself before you send your email campaigns

Some simple questions that still get overlooked by many email marketers.

1) What information does my email need to communicate?

2) What content am I going to feature?

3) What key indicators am I going to use to measure my success rate?

4) Have I created a proper email schedule and marketing plan?

5) Have these planning stages highlighted any changes that I may need to make before I begin?

Remember!

Each email campaign should be treated like a proper marketing campaign.

Email marketing is not effective when used as a blast all marketing tool without thought and planning.

If you do not measure your results, you do not know what the impact is of your emails!

11 steps for better email marketing

Here is a link to my short ebook called '11 steps for better email marketing'.

When you are putting together your email campaigns remember to check you have followed all the outlined steps to make sure you take advantage of each and every email you are sending.

View the PDF on Google


Don't forget to leave a comment about how you found the ebook. You can also sign up for the RSS feed so you will receive updates for every helpful post.


One of the biggest challenges with email marketing is giving yourself enough time in advance to plan fully around all the apsects of your campaign. See my post on how plan your email campaigns for the best return of investment for more advice.