High Volume Email Marketing: How To Avoid Sending Spam

E-mail marketing is considered to be among the best ways of reaching out to customers and prospects alike. Newsletters help you send more personalized communication to recipients because you can include information that is more likely to appeal to specific target groups. They also provide you with the option of adding different interactive elements like videos and graphics, while giving you the opportunity to gain even more eyeballs through exclusive offers.

Given the effort that most companies spend in crafting a design and researching content for a newsletter, wouldn’t it be a colossal waste if your email didn’t reach your clients? To win in the battle for inbox space, here are a few tips that will be useful for your next email marketing campaign:

The first thing you need to pay attention to is the subject line. If you end up using words that are likely to trigger spam alerts like ‘cash’ and ‘free’, you can forget about increasing inbox penetration. Other things that spam filters react to are abnormally punctuated sentences (too many exclamation marks, usage of all caps etc.) and weirdly constructed content.  The same rules apply to the content of your email. Steer clear of these commonly made mistakes.

In addition to content, it’s also critical to ensure that your HTML code doesn’t set off spam alerts. For example, if you’ve used a particular style of formatting, missed errors in the code or even used JavaScript carelessly, it’s likely that your email will be flagged as spam. Besides this, avoid using too many images. If you use too many images and too little text, you’re increasing the chances of getting blocked out. Maintain a good balance between the amount of text and images that go into your email.

If you’re not sure that your email is inbox-worthy, fear not. There’s a bunch of free software out there, which can help you scope your HTML email and tell you how likely it is that your email reaches inboxes. SPAMassasin.org is one such software that you could use. There are several other software more sophisticated than SPAMassassin.org that even recommend changes to improve email delivery rates.

One of the best ways of improving delivery rates to inboxes is to ask recipients to add your ‘From’ email to their contact lists. A lot of emails often end up in spam because some email service providers do not allow mails from unknown senders to enter client inboxes. Being in your customer’s address book greatly increases the possibility of clearing any spam filter.

Apart from this, spend a little time maintaining and managing your email list. It’s important to delete and update email addresses because people see them as a rather expendable commodity. If you continually send emails to invalid or outdated addresses, it affects your credibility as a large email marketer.

Beating spam filters can be a tricky job, but with a little effort and perseverance, reaching customer inboxes will be a breeze!