Poorly executed email campaigns are more than just a pain in the inbox; they are detrimental to the process of email marketing as a whole. In other words, you have a responsibility to your entire industry to ensure your marketing emails don’t annoy people—no matter what device they’re reading them on. While angling to beat spam filters might sound shady, crafting marketing emails to avoid spam filters forces you to engage in more effective messaging. This is good for everyone. Here’s how.
Understanding Spam Filters
While their precise operation—like a magician’s best trick—is a guarded secret, ongoing experience with spam filters has demonstrated certain traits will typically get your messages shuttled into junk folders. Chief among the considerations is the reputation of the sending IP address. If yours becomes known for junk, everything you send will be characterized as such.
Filters also check for authentication. The two primary methods of authentication are SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) Basically, SPF verifies the authorization of a sender’s IP address, while DKIM checks the actual content of the message to associate it with a domain name. Reputation and authentication, along with a few other factors, are the hurdles your message must overcome before finding its way into your recipients’ inboxes.
What Not to Do to Beat Spam Filters
With that said, be mindful of the following to avoid spam filters:
Employing Paid Email Lists
A lot of the recipients on these lists will mark your messages as junk, which will tell the filters to start screening your messages more vigorously.
Harvesting Email Addresses
Yeah, it’s a quick (and cheap) way to build a list, but the people whose addresses you get this way are very likely to declare your messaging junk. Eventually, your IP address’s reputation will be tainted. It’s also illegal.
Repeatedly Emailing Bounced Addresses
If your messages are bouncing, the addresses are probably bad. Sending to them repeatedly will cause spam filters to take note of the fact you aren’t paying attention to this and penalize you accordingly.
Using “Spammy” Content
All-caps subject lines, excessive use of exclamation points, video, flash and/or Java Script in the body of messages, forms embedded in messages, attachments, spam trigger words, red fonts and invisible text can all get your messages sent to junk folders.
On the subject of spam trigger words, the usual suspects vary according to the business. For example, if your goal is to start a furniture business, avoid words or phrases like “free”, “limited-time offer”, “act now”, “fantastic deals”, “this isn’t spam” (seriously…) and the like.
Poor grammar, misspellings, improper punctuation and overly long copy have also been known to trigger spam filters. Packing your messages with keywords is another good way to get them sent to that digital junkyard in the cloud. Be careful about employing images as well. Using one really big one, or including too many small ones can trigger a spam filter.
Best Practices to Avoid Spam Filters
The best way to build your mailing list is the old-fashioned way; ask people if it’s OK to send them messages. When you get a good list, keep it clean; discard bad addresses and unsubscribe people as soon as they ask to be. Use real names on the “To” and “From” lines, test your messages before broadcasting them and most importantly, send messages only when you have something valuable to offer.
If you’re crafting marketing emails to avoid spam filters based upon what you’ve read here, your messages should get through—and have a chance of being read on all types of devices.
