Avoid Spam Filters In eMail Marketing

Everyone involved in email marketing in any niche is concerned about the open rates in the emails they broadcast to their lists. The difference between an open rate of  8% and 30% can make a huge difference in your earnings.

But let’s forget about your open rates for a moment and dig a bit deeper. A significant portion of your emails may never even make it to your recipients. They may get blocked in cyberspace long before they make it to the end user’s mailbox–and that will be reflected in your open rates.

Web hosts, Internet service providers, auto-responder providers and third party spam filtering systems can all have an influence on how many of your emails actually get delivered.

And even if they get delivered, many of your emails may be going into spam folders at their final destination where they will never be read. So here are a few tips to help make sure as many of your emails as possible avoid the spam folders of your recipients.

Tip 1: Check Your Own Spam Box
You can get some insight into what kinds of emails get marked as spam by checking your own incoming emails. First open your own inbox and just give a cursory look at the subject lines of the emails you receive. Then look in your spam folder. Do you see anything different?

I have done this myself and here are some things I have noticed. A high percentage of emails hitting my spam folders have one of more these things in common.

A. They use numbers, especially in dollar amounts

B. They use all caps in subject lines or capitalizing every word in a subject line

C. They use your email address in the subject line

D. They use one or more of the following words in the subject line: earnings, commissions, profits, investment, funding, reward, download, bonus, free, activate, easy, easily, marketing, account, important, pending, proven, selected, claim confirmation, secrets, balance, money, make money, get paid, notification, status, deposit, confirm, free,  hash words (v1agra, vi.agra, f.ree, etc.), the % sign, the $ sign, and the use of “Re:” at the beginning of the subject line.

So by all means, do a little research yourself to see how your emails are segregated into spam and inbox folders.

Tip 2: Disaggregate You Subscriber List
Your subscriber list is not a homogeneous collection of names and email addresses. Major auto-responder services will allow you to search your lists using different sorting functions. Let’s look at some actual data. Here are the email services used by subscribers to one of my lists:

Gmail: 38%

YaHoo: 17%

HotMail: 9%

AOL: 3%

MSN: 2%

Other: 31%

Now, armed with that data, you can take the last email you broadcast (actually, take one you sent 2 weeks or so ago so people who open late are included) and sort out the list of those who actually opened it.

Then sort that list according to the mail services I collected above (use your own data, of course) and see if the open rates have a strong correlation to the above figures.

For example, suppose that the open rate among YaHoo subscribers turns out to be only 2.3%. That tells you that a disproportionate rate of YaHoo subscribers are not opening your emails because 17% of the recipients are using YaHoo mail. In fact, it is so disproportionate, that something must be going on. It is likely that YaHoo’s filters are flagging your emails as spam.

NOTE: YaHoo mail is notorious for assigning false positives to emails which have no spam characteristics at all!

You could simply live with that fact, or you could do some split testing to see if you can determine what YaHoo is finding objectionable with your emails. Split testing your emails is the only valid way to make informed decisions about what NOT TO DO to enhance the number of emails getting through to specific email clients.

To be honest, if it were MSN users who were not getting emails delivered to their in-box I wouldn’t lose much sleep. But if Gmail, YaHoo or HotMail messages were not getting through, I would spend considerable time trying to figure out why.

It could be your subject line; it could be the content; if you are mailing through a server of your own, your IP address could be blacklisted by a filtering service. Whatever the root cause, you could increase your open rates if you can determine what it is.

Tip 3: Subscribe To Your Own Lists Through Different Accounts
It goes without saying that you should be subscribing to your own lists through various accounts. Most definitely use a Gmail account, a YaHoo account, and a HotMail account as well as accounts through some of your private domains. With every email check to see if the email you just broadcast made it to your inbox, spam folder or neither (yikes!).

If your email is hitting spam folders in any accounts check your emails to see if you are violating any rules you’ve set up by analyzing the subject headings in emails you find in your own spam folders.

Most major auto-responder services let you check your outgoing emails using Spam Assassin or some similar tool before you send them out. But note, many emails with Spam Assassin scores of “0” will still hit spam folders. Do your homework.

Tip 4: Learn From The Spammers’ Mistakes!
Here’s a little hack that might come in useful.

Look in your spam folder. The best way to do this is to look for emails from senders whose emails regularly hit your inbox but for some reason hit your spam folder once in a while. Grab one of those emails and copy both the subject line and the body copy and save it to your notepad or clipboard.

I use aWeber, but you can do this with other services as well. Create a new broadcast email. Paste the subject line from the spam mail into the subject line for your new email (don’t worry, you won’t actually send this) and paste the body copy in as well. Save the email.

Now look at the score Spam Assassin assigns to the email you created. If it’s more than zero, it will likely give you reasons for the score it assigned to it. Maybe you used “bad” words, all caps, or too many links. Then trash the email.

Doing this a few times may help you learn why some of the mail you receive goes into your spam folder. It’s a learning curve that may be worth jumping on as it might help you prevent your own emails from ending up in spam folders as well.

Hope these things prove useful in achieving higher open rates for your emails!