Reach your customer’s inbox every time with these email marketing tips
If you are doing business online, chances are that you have a mailing list. If you don’t have a mailing list, you are leaving great big wads of cash on the table for the next guy to have. Either way, when sending out email marketing you should know how to avoid triggering the SPAM filters that are designed to stop spam email before it reaches the ISPs customers.
ISPs have to present spam filters to process emails destined for their customers. To take an inactive approach will in any event cost the ISP more pain and more lost customers than it would care to deal with. ISP customers expect that their ISP will take steps to prevent their customers from being bombarded with spam email, and the ISPs take that responsibility seriously.
The challenge for the sender of legitimate commercial email marketing is that there is no single standard in spam filters at the ISP level. In fact, there are different standards at each ISP, so it can present varied challenges in getting an email from one place to another.
In some cases, the spam filters are hypersensitive, and even an email to a friend can be blocked based on wording within the email. But the hypersensitive spam filters will generally be found only at the smallest of ISPs. The small ISPs do not have the resources to finely tune their spam filters, so they take the approach of killing most commercial-looking email marketing to ensure nothing risky gets through the filters to their customers.
If you keep reading, this article will present email marketing tips to avoid the dreaded spam filters. But it is important for you to understand that these tips are not provided so that you can spam email recipients ‚Äì to the contrary. These tips are provided to show you how to get legitimate emails through spam filters, but by all means, you should never send spam email. Make certain always that you have a person’s permission before sending them mail. Not only is not spamming good practice, but not spamming could also realistically save you from costly legal entanglements.
9 Email Marketing Tips For Avoiding Spam Filters:
- Email Marketing Tip #1: Make sure that your mailing list is comprised of people who have requested to receive email from you. Double opt-in is always best. Single opt-in is when someone fills out a form to join your mailing list. Double opt-in is when you send an email to a newly registered email address, asking them to verify their intent of receiving email from you.
- Email Marketing Tip #2: When people sign up to receive email from you, tell them what email address your mailings will be coming from, so that they can “whitelist ” your email address.
- Email Marketing Tip #3: Include an Unsubscribe link in every outgoing email.
- Email Marketing Tip #4: Publish your snail mail address in every outgoing email.
- Email Marketing Tip #5: Don’t send HTML emails without a built-in text version of the email.
- Email Marketing Tip #6: Don’t send attachments in your email. Not only is that bad manners to people who get their Internet services through dial-up ISPs, but attachments can also carry viruses.
- Email Marketing Tip #7: Don’t use BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) to send out your email. If an email is sent to more than ten people on BCC, ISPs will automatically filter it as spam. As an alternative to BCC, use a mailing list software or mailing list service such as Aweber or GetResponse to ensure that every email is addressed to only one person at a time. (Hint: Services such as Aweber or GetResponse invest a great deal of money to make sure email messages that they deliver reach their intended recipients.)
- Email Marketing Tip #8: Avoid common trigger words. Trigger words are those that tend to indicate a sales message involved in the mailing. See the list of the Top 20 Trigger Words
- Email Marketing Tip #9: Test your email copy using a free spam filter tool such as the one provided by Lyris
In the end, by utilizing these 9 email marketing tips in the construction and delivery of your email messages, you will find your email reaching more of your intended recipients than you would have otherwise.