Is Your Email Delivery Suffering? 3 Quick Ways to Avoid Spam Filters

There is nothing more frustrating that sending a mail and the receiver saying that he or she has not received it. You think for a moment and ask the person to check in their spam folders and voila! Lo and behold, your mail sitting snugly amongst an entire litany of advertising gimmicks sent by mail. If this is a problem that some people face with normal mails, imagine what happens when one tries to send bulk email. Today, there is little or no chance that a bulk email would ever end up in the inbox except if the user has opted-in for the mailing. But the problem doesn’t lie in the use of hypersensitive filtering mechanisms; rather, the problem lies in the formulation of bulk emails and a lack of investment in content creation for advertising. Spam filters are designed to pick clues in mails and reject them before they even come near your mail box.

Some filters use complicated mathematical techniques to calculate the probability of a keyword appearing in a spam mail and uses that probability and keyword as a benchmark to quarantine messages. This is not a set mechanism but a dynamic one. These filters actually learn from user behavior. These mechanisms use methods like Bayesian filters, which search for single words, and Markovian filters, which search for entire phrases. The question is therefore: how can I create content that won’t be picked up by spam filters?

The first step is to not sound obvious. Spam filtering works by checking the occurrence of words in an email; therefore, mention your product or type of service that you are offering only once or twice. Do not use product names or brand names more than once. This should be an obvious one because one mention is all that it takes for a person to identify what you are selling.

Second, use multimedia more and text less. This will definitely increase your marketing campaign costs but will be a more visually friendly medium for your clients and you will avoid spam filters in the process.

Finally, keep your writing style as professional as possible. Do not try to be cocky or pretend like you know the customer. Even if the filters don’t get you, the customer’s better judgment just might. Do not use senseless subject lines like “you owe me money,” or any such misleading line.

Apart from the content writing perspective, it is also important that you get the customer to respond back to you. This is a simple technique after the user opts-in. simply send an email for confirming the email address to the customer. If a confirmation mail is sent then even if the mail encounters spam filters and is sent to spam folder, it can be unmarked as spam by the user. This will make any further correspondence from you completely immune from the checks of the filters. However, remember that each mail should have an unsubscribe option.