7 Ways to Avoid the Spam Folder

1. Avoid dirty tricks

Random and extraneous characters in your email subject lines to attract recipients to open your emails simply do not work. Some examples of these are “pR!zE” “FREE Of33r!!!” Instead of catching the eye of your contacts, you are attracting spam filters.

2. “From” field names

“From” names are important. Spambots are quick to pick up if you are using fraudulent looking “from” names. Use familiar naming conventions such as “contact@”, “admin@”, “support@".

3. Risky practices

Over-usage of ALL-CAPS words should be avoided. When writing all-caps words, a very rough guideline is just once in every paragraph – if you really have to use ALL-CAPS at all. If you do need to emphasise words in your email, try using bold instead of capital letters. Also, exclamation marks should not be used inappropriately: e.g. “This!!!” One exclamation point is enough to make the reader aware your message is important.

4. Stay in touch!

Keep up regular communication. Emails that only arrive occasionally followed by a significant gap will hurt your open rate as recipients will not recognise your contact name. The solution is to keep up a steady flow of emails to your contacts.

5. Be compliant with your local “Anti-spam” legislation

You should be familiar with the anti-spam legislation for any country you are sending emails to. Such as:

New Zealand – The Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007

Australia – Spam Act 2003

USA – CAN-SPAM Act of 2003

Europe – General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

6. Keep a good text-image ratio

Don’t send an email with a single image and no text at all. This is a surefire trigger for spam filters. Likewise, adding too many images and not enough text isn’t good practice. As a communications channel, emails should be more about the words that you use, than the images that accompany them.

7. Unless you are using a validated list broker – avoid purchased lists

In the past, this tactic has been a common and popular technique to increase email responses. However, improved anti-spam algorithms have made it important that you only work with validated list brokers when doing this. If not then these messages can trigger spam filters that will ultimately lead to your emails languishing in the spam folder.

It’s nearly 2019 unless you are using a validated list broker – time to stop doing this or your email reputation will be at risk.

How do your current business email practices stack up? Contact the team at Cumulo9 for further advice: email us at support@cumulo9.com or phone:

NZ Support Line +64 9 377 8885

AU Support Line +61 3 9013 4568

USA Support Line +1 201 204 9460