There’s no silver bullet for getting passed spam filters. Even when your recipients have given their thumbs up.
Spam is unsolicited email sent to a list of people. It is not spam if you take that list and write personal, one-to-one emails to each recipient, and the content is unique for each recipient. Personalizing your email to individual recipients within Showroom Exchange helps avoid spam filters (see link below).
The United States federal CAN-SPAM Act became law on January 1, 2004. According to their website, the FTC says that if you violate the law, you could be fined $11,000 for each offense. Consult with your lawyer if you have one.
Each email provider uses a different type of filtering system, for example SpamAssassin will assign points and determine which emails should be tagged as spam. Here are a few of their criteria:
- Talks about lots of money (.193 points)
- Describes some sort of breakthrough (.232 points)
- Looks like mortgage pitch (.297 points)
- Contains urgent matter (.288 points)
- Money back guarantee (2.051 points)
How do you tell if you are being spam filtered? Check your open rate, if it suddenly dropped from your average then you are probably being spam-filtered. If your bounce rate is higher than normal, that might also indicate that you are being spam filtered.
Some things to do to avoid filters and comply with the law:
- Never use deceptive headers, subject lines, from-names, or reply-tos
- Always provide an unsubscribe link (Showroom Exchange provides for you)
- Include your physical mailing address
Here is a list of things to watch out for:
- Using spam like phrases, like “Click here!” or “Once in a lifetime opportunity!”, make your call-to-action links more like: “Here is the Linesheet in PDF”
- Going mental with punctuation and other symbols!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ???????????? $$
- USING ALL CAPS, especially in the subject line
- Coloring fonts bright red or green
- Coding sloppy HTML, usually from converting a Microsoft Word file to HTML – it is best to compose your emails in the editor.
- Creating an HTML email that’s nothing but one large image, with little or no text (since spam filters can’t read images, they assume you’re a spammer that’s trying to trick them)
- Sending a test to multiple recipients within the same company (that company’s email firewall can only assume it’s a spam attack)
- Misleading (or missing) subject line
- Whenever possible ask your recipients to white-list you
Related:
http://blog.showroomexchange.com/reduce-the-risk-of-e-balsts-getting-tagged-as-spam/