While anti-spam software and spam filtering is great news for anyone trying to avoid spam, it’s not so good for businesses that rely on email marketing strategies. Curating the perfect email marketing content is worth little if your audience never gets to see it!
To ensure your email marketing campaigns get the exposure they deserve, you need to ensure your emails don’t get filtered out by anti-spam software or labelled as spam by recipients. Spam-proof your email marketing with these tips.
The law
It’s important that email marketers abide by laws designed to tackle the spam problem. While the rules vary from country to country, they often include things like:
- Gain permission to email the people on your lists
- Make it clear your email is an advertisement
- Don’t use misleading header information
- Include a valid postal address in the email
- Include an ‘opt-out’ mechanism in your emails, e.g. an unsubscribe button
- Honour ‘opt-out’ requests promptly
Avoid trigger words
One way to avoid getting flagged as spam is to stay away from trigger words. These are essentially a list of common words and phrases used in subject lines that indicate whether or not your email is actually relevant to your audience. The list of trigger words changes constantly, but it often includes things like ‘take action’, ‘click here’, ‘dear friend’, or ‘urgent’.
When it comes to writing subject lines, you should also avoid:
- Writing in all caps
- Using less than three words
- Including excessive punctuation
- Making spelling mistakes
- Adding RE: at the start
Personalise it
The first emails to get marked as spam are the ones to which the recipient has no personal connection. So, instead of sending your marketing emails from an anonymous account, make the sender a member of your organisation – for example, ‘Joe Bloggs from MailCleaner’. The recipient will recognise either the individual’s name or the company name, which will subsequently increase the chances of your email being opened and reduce your chances of being sent straight to the spam folder.
Grow your lists organically
Using purchased lists to grow your subscribers might be tempting, but it will almost certainly get your emails flagged as spam, either by the sender or by spam filters. It might even get you blacklisted.
Organically building a list of subscribers might take longer and feel like a lot of work, but it will produce better results in the long run. Not only will it reduce your chances of irritating recipients and being marked as spam, but it will probably also lead to higher engagement and support from subscribers.
Make your content relevant
If people actually enjoy your emails, they won’t mark them as spam. So, make your emails relevant and appealing to your audience. Ask yourself every time whether the content contains something of value to the recipient – if it doesn’t, don’t send it. Your goal should always be to shift away from blanket emails toward a more customised strategy that actually adds value.
By understanding the distinctions between marketing emails and spam emails, you can take steps to ensure that your email content is spam-proofed and destined for success. Make anti-spam software your friend today!
Anti-spam software can also keep your business protected against unsolicited emails and the harmful content they sometimes contain. MailCleaner offers shared and virtual cloud-based anti-spam solutions that can secure your communications and protect your business. Contact us to find out more.