Email Marketing Weekly

It’s happened to all of us: we craft our email, to send to our permission based list, but it still ends up in the junk filter. Well, here are four different ways to beat the email spam filter for legitimate emails. This is not to promote spam, but to promote deliverability.

1. Watch your links. Does your email delivery tool mask your links (generally to track the link click through), if so, you may come across the problem where your recipient’s email browser thinks its spam or a scam. Why? Because if you physically have http://www.mycompanyname.com/ in your email, AND link to it, there is a disconnect between the visable link, and the actual link, since its being masked. How do you get around this? Change your web address to ‘visit us now’, or some variation.
2. Watch what you say, and how you say it. Free, Limited Time Offer, Act Now, from $9.99, SAVE BIG!!! are all words that add to your spam score. Try re-wording or even eliminating anything that may sound spammy. Same goes for the subject line.
3. Send from a clean IP address. If you’re using some generic server to send email, or are on shared hosting, you may be taking the blame for other people’s poor judgment. Your own dedicated IP address means that YOU are in control of what goes out, and how clean your IP stays. As your email list size grows, it may prove beneficial to move over to your own private IP email server.
4. Don’t send spam! If its not relevant or anticipated, its not going to be accepted very well and the recipient might flag it as spam themselves. Keep your messages on point with what the recipient signed up for, as well as actually useful to them… and don’t flood their inboxes with every little idea the marketing department has each week. A consistent, relevant, and anticipated message will be far more likely to get through, and read, than one that isn’t.

By paying close attention to these four tips, you’ll begin to increase delivery. Its important to continue tracking and monitoring each of your email campaigns, as if you don’t know what your delivery rate was last week, how do you know it improved today?