2nd Impression

Tips to Avoid Spam Filters

No matter how genuine your email is or how legitimate your list is, if you send emails for long enough, you will encounter spam issues. Even sending to people who have opted in to your list, people who want to receive your emails, will not help you avoid all of the spam filters all of the time. In fact some of those people will actually forget that they opted in and report you as spam themselves!



So how do you avoid it? You can’t unfortunately. But what you can do is reduce the chances by addressing the criteria that the spam filters look for. Most of them work on a points basis, allocating points to all the aspects of your email. If the total score hits above a certain mark, then your email is classed as spam. Simple.

Things to watch out for and things to do:

–

Avoid writing everything in capital letters.

–

Try to steer clear of common spammy words and phrases like ‘Buy Now’, ‘Once in a Lifetime’, ‘Why Pay More’, ‘Earn Loads of Money’etc.

–

Make sure your image to text ratio is not too high (so whatever you do, don’t design your email as a solid image).

–

Avoid large size fonts and font colours like bright red and green.

–

Don’t have lots of exclamation marks.

–

Try to avoid sending too many emails in too short a space of time to the same ISP email.

–

Using a WYSIWYG html editor program (or converting a Word document) will score highly in the spam filters.

–

Do test your email before the final broadcast, sending it to clients like AOL, Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo.

–

Ensure you deal responsibly with removal requests and ISP spam reports. You don’t need many of these to report you again for you to have problems.

–

Make sure you’re dealing with bounced emails and deleting them from your list. If not and you’re re-sending to these addresses again and again, you’ll soon get flagged by ISPs as a potential spammer.

–

Don’t shoot yourself in the foot by sending to email addresses that have been taken down incorrectly or typed out incorrectly. Make sure you are getting the right address and often check your list for spelling errors and typos.


There’s a lot to do to get it right. But do it and, not only will you avoid problems, your results will be far better.

2ndimpression take care of all of this and more in their managed Email Marketing service.


Image credit – Dave Parker





•

Avoid writing everything in capital letters.

•

Try to steer clear of common spammy words and phrases like ‘Buy Now’, ‘Once in a Lifetime’, ‘Why Pay More’, ‘Earn Loads of Money’etc.

•

Make sure your image to text ratio is not too high (so whatever you do, don’t design your email as a solid image).

•

Avoid large size fonts and font colours like bright red and green.

•

Don’t have lots of exclamation marks.

•

Try to avoid sending too many emails in too short a space of time to the same ISP email.

•

Using a WYSIWYG html editor program (or converting a Word document) will score highly in the spam filters.

•

Do test your email before the final broadcast, sending it to clients like AOL, Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo.

•

Ensure you deal responsibly with removal requests and ISP spam reports. You don’t need many of these to report you again for you to have problems.

•

Make sure you’re dealing with bounced emails and deleting them from your list. If not and you’re re-sending to these addresses again and again, you’ll soon get flagged by ISPs as a potential spammer.

•

Don’t shoot yourself in the foot by sending to email addresses that have been taken down incorrectly or typed out incorrectly. Make sure you are getting the right address [link] and often check your list for spelling errors and typos [link].

2 responses to “Tips to Avoid Spam Filters”

Leave a Reply