How to avoid your outgoing e-mails being caught up in spam/junk filter

When you e-mail people you don’t “know” (as in, have already communicated with via e-mail in the past, so their address book might contain your e-mail address), there’s a chance of your e-mail ending up in their spam/junk filter, let’s just call it spam filter. While it doesn’t happen so often, it really can depend on what e-mail server the recipient is using.

For example, Google/Gmail has a pretty good spam filter that’s right most of the time, especially after you’ve learned it for a short while, what you consider spam and what is not. Also remember to add legit senders to the Gmail address book, that’s a very powerful way of saying “don’t send e-mails from this sender to spam”. Other mail services, or e-mail apps, might not be as good.

So here are 5 tips on how to significantly reduce the chances of your sent e-mail being caught by recipients spam filter…

1) Avoid too many sales’y words. If your e-mail seems as if you’re trying too hard to sell something, it might get a higher “spam score” than it really deserves. So try to avoid that, especially too many occurrences of the following words are usually a bad idea: cash, cheap, congratulations, credit, debt, discount, free, money, marketing, promotions, sales, save, stock, subscribe, trading, win/winner/won etc.

2) Give your e-mail a unique subject line. Avoid using the words mentioned in #1 above, in the subject, or at least be careful about it. Try to make your subject unique so that it doesn’t sound like something thousands of other e-mails have already sent through the Internet recently.

3) Keep it simple, stupid. No I didn’t just call you stupid, but that’s what the popular saying goes like: “KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid”. It also applies to your e-mail layout, don’t try to be too fancy and crazy with your e-mail layouts and design. Of course the spam filters cannot see how your graphics looks like, but HTML-wise, the simpler, the better.

4) Don’t use too much graphics. Many spam filters look at the “text to graphics-ratio” as factor in determining spam. No worries if you’re just including your company logo.

5) Avoid too many links. Spammers often fill their spam mails with links, hoping that the recipient will at least click on one of them. Reduce links to what you absolutely need, and best to include links “as is”, like this: https://techpatio.com
Instead of like this “click here” or “TechPatio” or “click here to become amazing” (all the links leads to our frontage, FYI).

6) – bonus tip: Use a reputable Email Service Provider (ESP) for your email marketing needs. Those often cooperate with big e-mail providers such as Gmail, Hotmail etc., to increase your chances of hitting the inbox instead of the spam box.

That’s it. Now, go out there and become an e-mail ninja!