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How to Make Sure Your Emails Aren't
Flagged as Spam
Making Sure Your Marketing Messages Get
Delivered.
Paul Smithson - 24th November 2008
One big problem you can face as an Internet
marketer is seeing your emails flagged as spam. When this
happens, your emails will be caught by spam filters and a
percentage of them, often a very large percentage, will never
be read as the recipient will never see them. This could be
disastrous for your business, so it’s critical that you avoid
things that might trigger a spam
filter.
One thing you can do to reduce the chance
of this happening is to choose your words
carefully.
The reason for this is that there are
certain words that are known to trigger spam filters. Here are
some of the most common.
- Money
- Free
- Bad credit
- Viagra
- MLM or multi-level marketing
- Free leads
- Free preview
- Serious cash
- Order now
- Online pharmacy
- No credit check
- No medical exams
Obviously, some of these are worse than
others, but as a general rule you are best to try and use
alternatives where possible.
There are many more words and phrases that
commonly trigger spam filters. A little research on the
web should bring you some large lists of these common
triggers.
Some people suggest you put a period or
other symbol between some of the letters in these words in
order to avoid triggering the spam filters (e.g. F.REE instead
of FREE), but most of the sophisticated spam filters can now
detect this, and this will make your message appear even more
like spam.
One or two occurrences of many of these
won’t be enough to trigger spam filters in most cases, but if
you have to use them more than that, you’re best looking for
alternatives to replace them
with.
In addition to watching which words you use
there are several other things you can do to help prevent your
mail from being incorrectly identified as
spam.
Make sure the DNS entries for your domain
are correct, and make certain you have SPF and Sender ID
records. The reason for this is that ISPs that receive mail
often check the DNS records to be sure you aren’t listed on a
blacklist, so your DNS needs to be configured properly. You
should also make sure the Sender ID is correct, as a few mail
services now block messages that don’t have the proper Sender
ID.
The above isn’t an exhaustive list of ways
of avoiding being caught in the dreaded spam filters, but it is
a good starting point. If you follow the above advice you will
be far less likely to end up in people’s spam folders and in so
doing you will be helping to maximize the number of people who
read your mailings.
About Paul Smithson -
Paul Smithson is the founder of Intellimon and the driving
force behind the best-selling XSitePro web site development
tool. Since graduating in Business Strategy and Direct
Marketing from two of Europe’s leading business schools, Paul
has set up five multi-million dollar companies, one of which is
now owned by the BBC. His areas of expertise include business
strategy, e-commerce, on-line and off-line marketing, software
development, and maximizing the potential of on-line
businesses.
For more information about
this, and many other Internet Marketing-related
topics, visit Paul Smithson's site,
www.xsitepro.com. |
Source:
http://www.xsitepro.com/how-to-make-sure-your-emails-are-not-flagged-as-spam.html
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