Do Not Look Like Spam

Don’t Look Like Spam

There is an art to email delivery that really is not that difficult to understand when you put your private email communications in context. Most of us encounter email delivery problems when we start using email for marketing purposes and we are sending out a lot of emails to many customers. You may have noticed that very rarely do you encounter email deliverability problems with your private emails to friends or even with business emails.

That is because spam filter software has become very adept at telling the difference between a professional email that could be spam and private communications. So naturally that tells us something important about how to go about avoiding email delivery problems when constructing marketing communications. You just have to work to make sure your marketing emails do not look like spam and look more like a private email so they fly right through spam filters and get to your customers.

In addition your marketing emails must act like private emails. That means if you have a well developed mailing list of perhaps several thousand of email addresses or more, do not manage that from your private email service. For a mailing of that size, it is best to utilize the services of a professional autoresponder service. The cost is nominal and could be by the mailing. They can send out your emails in such a way as to not draw the alarms of the spam filter software guardians. And they often offer additional services such as deliverability reports, retransmits of bounced emails and reports of bad email addresses that can save you a lot of time and make you more efficient as well.

One of the ways that spam filters often identify spam is by the level of graphics that is used in the marketing email. While very attractive emails do send a message of professionalism to the customer, they don’t send that message if they end up at the bottom of a spam quarantine folder. So avoid the use of graphics altogether. Just say what you have to say to your customer and then draw them to your web site with a link where they can see your professional graphics.

Have you ever scanned a full spam filter holding folder? If you have not, you should because it will tell you a lot about how spammers write. Just by scanning twenty or thirty of these spam messages, you can get a feel for the techniques used by spammers and you can avoid those methods in writing your own marketing emails. This falls under the "know thy enemy" category of doing battle with email delivery problems because it is the spammer that is the enemy here.

When writing an email that will go out to your customers or prospective customers, think of that customer as one person whom you are writing to as a friend. Be informal and avoid a lot of marketing "hype" and hyperbole. Spam filters are good at "listening" for the language of spam artists so if you write like a person writing to a person, it is very likely your email will go right on through because it will not be flagged as marketing at all. And the other benefit of writing like this to your customers is that it is a warm and personal style that will work well in communicating to customers.

Make a hobby of keeping up with how spam emailers work and how their messages change as they learn to get around spam filters. The spam filter businesses will be changing with them so be aware of any new trends in this stange part of cyberspace communication so you can alter how you create your marketing emails so you make sure your communications with your customers never look like spam.