One of the most effective ways to market your upcoming event is by email. Unfortunately, as email spammers become more and more creative in their approach, it becomes harder to get your message by the omnipresent “gate keeper”, your audience’s junk mail filter. With that in mind, here are our Top Five Tips to Keep Your Email Broadcast From Being Flagged as Spam:

This one is just common sense. Besides looking aggressive and LIKE YOU’RE YELLING AT YOUR AUDIENCE, it’s one of the least sophisticated, and most common attention-getters that a spammer could use. While they’re getting more resrouceful, nobody ever said they were getting more tasteful.

Junk email filters tend to hone in on several “tried-and-true” key words, phrases, and characters. Try to keep your subject line free of overtly “sales-ey” terms (“Satisfaction Guaranteed!”, “Free fill in the blank!”, etc.). Under no circumstances put a dollar sign ($) in your subject line, which is the email equivalent of taking a bullhorn and announcing “I am spaaaammmm, please automatically file me away where nobody can see me!”

Although you ideally want a large list of potential contacts, if your unsubscribe link is difficult to find, your recipient might find it easier to lodge a complaint regarding your broadcast, which will hurt your online reputation. The more complaints received regarding the emails you send, the higher the likelihood that the email service provider will blacklist you altogether.

With all of the assets your marketing department might have on hand, it’d be hard not to be tempted to include five or six powerful images in your email broadcast – after all, you want this to look slick, right? Well, if you do go overboard with the graphics, the probablility that your email will be flagged as spam will skyrocket! Additionally, many email providers automatically filter out images (Hotmail and Gmail, to name two). The trick is not to eliminate images entirely, but rather to use them effectively:

a – Place your image as a banner: Place your image at the top of your email – don’t have it any wider than 700 pixels, or any taller than 75 pixels.

b – Keep most text out of the image: Use actual text for communicating words – messages with only graphical content and no actual text tend to be flagged. Also, if your image is filtered out, the actual message won’t be received.

c – Keep the file size reasonable: Who wants their email client clogged up with huge image files?

As a colour that relays a sense of urgency, red fonts have been used extensively in the spamming world – avoid using red if at all possible.

There are a number of free tools online (such as http://spamscore.me/) that will take a sample email, process it, and assess its likelyhood of getting caught in a junk mail folder.

Until the day that promised FUSSP (Final, Ultimate Solution for the Spam Problem) finally comes around though, the three-way tug of war between spammers, anti-spam software engineers, and legitimate email marketers will continue. Whatever service you use, make sure that it’s reputable, and that they are actively working to prevent spam from being sent from their servers. The more spam they send, the higher the likelihood that they’ve been blacklisted by several email service providers, reducing your overall reach. It may be difficult to get a 100% delivery rate for your email broadcast, but with a few easy steps, you can definitely get most of them in.

Top Five Tips to Keep Your Event Invitation Email From Being Flagged as Spam

Top Five Tips to Keep Your Event Invitation Email From Being Flagged as Spam

Top Five Tips to Keep Your Event Invitation Email From Being Flagged as Spam

1 – Don’t use allcaps:

2 – Beware of specific words and characters – especially in the subject line of the email:

3 – Make the “Unsubscribe” link prominent on the email:

4 – Avoid overuse of images:

5 – Avoid red fonts:

Free Spam Testing Tool

Follow ePly

Subscribe

Search

Categories

Recent Posts