E-mail marketing is an effective marketing method with a very high ROI. Unfortunately, spammers and scammers have made it more difficult for legitimate senders to get their e-mails past Internet Service Provider (ISP) junk filters and into the inbox, while consumers are all too ready to hit the spam button. The good news is there are steps you can take to avoid the spam label and increase your e-mail marketing effectiveness.
1. Here are some key words to skip: Urgent, money back guarantees, and why pay more?
2. Avoid using ALL CAPITAL LETTERS and exclamation marks in your subject line and in your E-MAIL CONTENT!!
3. If something sounds too good to be true, the junk mail filters probably agree. Do not claim a “once in a lifetime opportunity” and other grandiose offers.
4. Never send out an e-mail that is one giant image. The filters will likely filter it but even if it gets to the inbox, the recipient will have no enticement to turn on images. A good balance is 60 percent text and 40 percent graphics. Do not forget the ALT text.
5. While discussing money is unavoidable, try to avoid excessive mentions of money in your e-mails as the spammers and scammers have made that hard to get through.
6. I think most of us have seen e-mails with red font, flashing objects, etc. Keep it simple to maximize your chances of getting into the inbox.
7. Do not buy a list both because this violate the terms of service of almost all E-mail Service Providers (ESPs) and because your recipients are more likely to hit the spam complaint button that is a common feature of many e-mail clients these days. More than one complaint out of each 1,000 e-mails sent is very likely to get you blocked by one or more ISPs and make it more difficult to get emails through to your best customers.
8. Do not harvest e-mails from the web to send in bulk. Not only will you run into the same problems as when you buy a list, you will also be violating the CAN-SPAM Act.
9. Keep your e-mail frequency reasonably steady to keep your sending reputation intact. For instance, if you send only once every six months the ISPs and the recipients may have forgotten about you resulting in delivery problems and spam complaints.
10. On the other hand, do not send so often that you annoy your subscribers. You probably want to send at least once per month, but you’ll need to carefully consider what volume will start to annoy your subscribers—who will unsubscribe from your list or worse, hit the spam button, sticking a label on you that can be hard to remove.
Neil Anuskiewicz is the director of business development at StreamSend Email Marketing.
