Email Spam Filters: 3 Ways They Kill Your Delivery

Spam filters are indeed an ingenious invention. Without human intervention, they identify mails that are spam by just using complicated mathematics. This is artificial intelligence that is truly mystifying. Of course, this is from the perspective of most people who receive spam mail and filters are not really a boon for the people sending out bulk emails. It is thanks to these filters that the amount of spam traffic is finally on the wane and seeing a reduction in numbers. There are many that say that this will herald the end of email marketing but others would state that this simply means that email marketers need to get more serious about how they perform their trade. A large number of internet marketers are actually spammers who arbitrarily send email to all and sundry. Any book on sales and marketing will tell you that this is a ridiculous approach and precise targeting is what is required to make a sale.

Filters use ingenious methods to find spam mail. But rather than propagating the benefits of these filters, let us look at the common mistakes that are made by most spammers to end up getting entangled in the web of spam filters.

The first mistake is to shout out the product and the offer to the recipient out loud. The logic here is simple. If you mention words often enough, then the spam filter will pick up these occurrences and based on a saved set of preferences, will identify your mail as spam. Apart from this, more accurate filtering mechanisms will also find entire sets of phrases that are dubious and send them straight to the spam folder. Therefore, it can be ascertained that the days of hard sell and overdosing on sales spiel is over. Rather, the new rules dictate that you should use you bulk email as an information service that redirects back to the main site for the sales spiel.

The next common mistake that spammers make is to use aliases and subject lines that try to trick the user into opening the mail. Most filtering mechanisms scan a user's address book and sent items folder to find friendly addresses. This means that a spammer trying to sound more personal and friendly is just setting himself or herself up for targeting. It makes more sense to simply be honest about your corporate internet identity.

The final mistake that most spammers do is being lazy enough to not get opt-ins from clients. Most genuine marketers can avoid spam filters by simple sending a confirmatory email to the prospective user. This will allow the user to unmark non-spam messages; thereby, forever rendering the sender immune from getting analyzed by a spam filter. Getting these opt-ins is a difficult and sometimes costly exercise so you have to weigh the benefits of whether it makes sense to invest so much and the probability of getting a sale with the extra effort. These decisions should take the type of product into consideration.