After a a brief hiatus, we're back with more additions to our nSite series, designed to give you advice you can use to get the most out of your website and related services.
This time, we've decided to focus our nSite article on how to get the most out of 3n1media's integrated email marketing service—specifically, how to make sure your email newsletters don't get caught by your audience's spam filters. Now, spam filters are our friends. They help keep spammers, phishers, and other web-dwelling ne'er-do-wells from reaching our inboxes. But as advanced as they have become, sometimes spam filters keep legitimate emails from reaching their audience. And that's why understanding the basics of how spam filters work is an important element of email marketing.
Sure, there are things we can do technically—under the hood, so to speak—to make sure our emails get through to our intended recipients (updating SPF records, etc.). And we can certainly help you take some of these steps. But there are also steps that we can take outside of the technical realm and inside the realm of content.
Essentially, most spam filters work by applying scores to an email, assigning points to different content elements (words, images, formatting, etc.) that may indicate that an email is spam. If your email’s score is over a certain threshold, the filter will mark the email as spam and either deliver it with a warning or block it outright.
Now, it probably isn’t worth your time to try to figure out how each individual spam filter scores email messages—and it would probably be impossible to do so, because they're all different. But there are some overall best practices to adopt which will drastically reduce the chances of your email marketing campaigns being blocked by spam filters. Here are just a few:
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Always, always, always test your email marketing campaigns before sending them to your audience. Send them to yourself, and preferably to several email addresses, to make sure they are getting past different spam filters. If they don't make it past a spam filter, you'll know you need to make some changes.
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Avoid mentioning dollar amounts. If you must give amounts, try to keep it to the body of the email and out of the subject line.
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Avoid excessive punctuation (especially exclamation marks) and capitalization (i.e., don’t use all caps).
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Use fancy formatting and images in moderation. Spam filters measure your image-to-text ratio, so if your campaign is particularly image-heavy, your email might score high on the spam-o-meter.
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Avoid spam-like words or phrases—especially in your subject line. Here’s a list of such words and phrases, but basically, it’s probably most helpful to ask yourself, “What if I saw an email with this phrase in the subject line?” If you think your subject line looks spammy, odds are the filter will too.
Of course, this isn't an exact science. But as long as you're cognizant of making sure your campaign doesn't trip any of the major spam alarms, you'll be getting through to as many people as possible. As always, feel free to give us a shout if you have any questions, or hit us up on Facebook or Twitter.