Spam filters can be a wonderful thing! As many of us remember, back in the dark ages in the late 1990′s when email became a necessary evil, so too was spam. None of us could open our email without being inundated with a variety of pesky (and sometimes profane) spam messages. Thankfully, filters and pop-up blockers were born. They aren’t perfect  and nothing is more frustrating than discovering your clients or customers are not getting your email or newsletters because of an error in spam filtering. In fact, up to 30% of legitimate email may not get through because of these errors. What steps can you take to ensure that yours don’t end up going unnoticed?

Make sure you have permission to be emailing your clients and customers. This is called opting in and is a requirement for anything that might involve sales. This happens through a verified confirmation link that you click on to confirm you have subscribed. In your return message, after they’ve clicked the confirmation link, BE SURE to ask them to add your email address to their contacts list.This should prevent most emails from ending up in spam.

If your email bounces back from a subscriber’s email address 2-3 times in a 30 day period, promptly remove it. If you don’t, internet service providers may block you from sending out mass email like newsletters assuming it is unrequested spam.

Our “My Small Business Mentor” newsletter is now offered in both interactive HTML format and a plain text version. Most email servers can handle HTML at this point but if they can’t, and you haven’t made a plain text version available, your newsletter or email may bounce back. If you have plain text, that will be delivered safely instead.

Finally, watch your content. Even if the topic is legitimate your email may be blocked if it references popular spam topics like mortgages, medications and making money. If these are real topics you need to address, do so with the least inflammatory language possible. Provide something of value and you are more likely to bypass spam filters.

I cover this topic more in-depth here.

Tagged as: email, email marketing, HTML, newsletters, pop-up blockers, spam, spam filters