Top 3 Things That Trigger Email Spam Filters

Spam filters can be quite tricky to contend with especially if it is your mails that the filter is trying to block. This is a common problem that is faced by most bulk email marketers. The problem fundamentally lies in the fact that most bulk email marketers and spammers are not really discriminated against by a filtering mechanism. This simply means that you could be a well meaning pharmacist who has decided to mail customers, perhaps as a newsletter; however, because of the nature of your business and perhaps a few keywords, your newsletters or promotional emails could simply end up in the spam folders of your clientele's mailbox.

When this happens, you need to introspect and look closely at the kind of information you are sending out as well as the way you acquired people's email addresses. Use the following top three tips to ensure that this is not repeated.

The first thing that you must do is start paying more attention to content. Advanced filtering mechanisms actually learn from user behavior. As users mark mail they consider spam, the content of the mail is analyzed for patterns in words and phrases for "spam" words. This could be anything from words like free, discount, certain brand names and product names, click here, or any other words that is pushing a hard sell strategy. Rewrite your content in such a way that the spam filters cannot pick up a single word more than once and that you don't make any obvious gestures to promote a sale.

The next and probably the most important thing that you need to do is get a client's opt in before you start to mail him or her. This number one reason for mails to get rejected is that people don't follow this rule. Ensure that you get a user's opt-in and send a mail to that person as a confirmatory email. This importantly, will ensure that when the mail does reach the client, the recipient will not mark the mail as spam mail.

Another important content change that you need to do is to incorporate more imagery and embed most of the slightly more spam-worthy words in the image. The object of sending a mail in any case is to send users back to a base website, and to ensure the complete sale anyway.

Probably a change that most marketers have to do whether online or offline is to learn that customers value information more than sales spiel. This is important to avoid spam filters as newsworthy and informative articles do not get targeted like regular spam mail. When you combine all these methods, you should be able to send your bulk email and newsletters with little to fear from filtering mechanisms. Ultimately, whether these add up to sales is a question then of how good your product and service levels are. Even if you don't make a sale, customers will always remember good information given.