Avoid Spam Filters

Bulk emails must be permission-based, have an unsubscribe facility and should conform to industry guidelines for delivery. It's equally important that you focus on getting your email through the various filters which pose at least three obstacles: ISPs blocking the email as spam, company spam filters and server settings and/or client side spam rules and filters. This excludes the blacklisting services, which many companies subscribe to. If your domain is blacklisted, your customers may not receive your emails.

Why are your emails marked as spam?

Your past behavior in email marketing (consistency, relevancy, relationship/engagement with your customer) determines if your email will land in the customer's inbox. Despite an excellent track record and customer interaction with your emails, some emails may still be marked as spam – what's the reason for this?

Certain rules within the spam filters may cause your emails to be marked as spam.

Guidelines to understanding why content is being blocked:

11 spam words to avoid in your subject line

If a font is too big or too small Amount of images relative to text The words used within the email or subject line The font color (should be web-safe palette) The ‘from' wording The from and reply addresses Percentage of HTML code in the email

Bulk email messages are stopped if:

• There are too many messages coming into a company or flooding a domain at the same time
• The IP address from which you are sending messages has been blacklisted

Avoid being seen as spam

Here are 5 simple steps you can take to avoid your email being seen as spam:

1. A close relationship with ISPs is needed – understand why your emails are being blocked and action changes immediately.
2. Monitor 100% success rate or 100% bounce rate on a certain domain – this could indicate a problem with the company or ISP.
3. Test your emails using a spam checking tool - identify what issues you can fix without detracting from your message.
4. Subject lines should never sound like spam - don't try to fool recipients into opening your email by making the subject line sound like a reply or a personal message between friends.
5. Colors - text and links colors should be taken from the web-safe palette in Photoshop, as anything else gets picked up by spam filters. Colors in images don't really matter.

Spammers will constantly change the way they send emails. As a result, rules and spam filters get refined. It is vital that digital marketers stay abreast of trends and changes. Digital marketing is an evolving route to market and stagnation will result in declining deliverability and open rate.

Concerned your emails are being stopped by spam filters? Get advice from an eMarketing specialist, contact us or let us call you back.