Email marketing is an enormous part of your overall digital marketing success. However, how to avoid spam filters is a question that can often thwart your efforts. The fact is, over 20 percent of email marketing messages never make it to their destination (a recipient’s inbox). The major reason for this is spam filters, which score emails and reject ones with too high a risk score.
The score is based on a variety of factors, and knowledge is power. So here a few tips on how you can increase your emails’ chances avoiding the pesky barrier of spam filters.
1. Design Inbox-Friendly Emails
There are plenty of things that will trigger a spam filter and prevent an email from reaching its destination. Some best practices include avoiding JavaScript, Flash, and videos. Similarly, keep images to a minimum, and make sure they’re small. Finally, it’s best not to include forms or attachments.
2. Make Sure You Have Permission
Sending commercial messages to people who don’t want to receive them means chances are high that your emails will get deleted or reported. Especially in countries where anti-spam laws are strict, i.e. CASL. But when you get permission, you can avoid this and ensure that the people who want to receive messages, are. To be compliant with recent legislation, always include an unsubscribe option.
3. Avoid the Bad Words
Certain words epitomize the sleazy snake oil salesman sales pitch and automatically trigger spam filters, including:
- Free
- Promo
- Buy
- Prize
- Bonus
- Guarantee
It’s also wise to avoid using all CAPS, and don’t overuse exclamation points. Considering thatnearly 70 percent of people report emails based on the subject alone, it’s especially important to avoid overusing exclamation points in a subject line.
4. Be Up Front
People used to use plenty of dirty tricks to get recipients to open emails, but those won’t fly today. These include writing deceptive subject lines and making misleading claims (like telling somebody they’ve won a prize when they haven’t).
5. Remove Hard Bouncers
When you want to know how to avoid spam filters, you must consider your sender’s reputation. This is basically a rating that determines the deliverability of your emails. The higher your reputation, the better the chances that emails will get through.
One major factor that can affect your reputation is a hard bounce, which happens when you send an email to a defunct or non-existent address. Therefore, to keep up your reputation, remove addresses from your list if sent emails have bounced in the past.
6. Build a Relationship With Recipients
This is arguably one of the best tips we can give you about how to avoid spam filters, because it covers so many different aspects, including:
- Use a familiar name in the sender field
- Personalize the to field with each recipient’s name
- Ask subscribers to add you to their address books
- Use a reputable email marketing service who will have your domain or address whitelisted
- Send emails regularly so subscribers remember you and don’t automatically delete or report your emails
7. Keep It Professional
There are many reasons to spell check your emails before sending. On top of avoiding embarrassing auto-correct mistakes like writing incontinent when you mean incompetent, you’ll also increase the chances that your emails will be delivered and not flagged.
Testing your emails before sending them will help to ensure that your important marketing messages are getting through properly. When you use Clickback’s email lead generation software, you can easily design professional emails that get through and get attention.
Just as importantly, you can also send emails to clean purchased contact lists through Clickback without fear that emails won’t get through. Thanks to the software that ensures all the names on your list are legitimate, you can keep your reputation high and get access to a brand new network of people.
Ultimately spam filters exist to save consumers from endless streams of unwanted, fake mail. As marketers, we often have a love-hate relationship with the parametres, but learning how to avoid spam filters will help us get our message to the right people.