How to get your emails past Microsoft’s spam filters

Email marketing can be highly effective. Provided you have a good quality mailing list, an interesting offer and a powerful call-to-action, you should be able to achieve profitable rates of conversion.

But what if Microsoft, Google et al decide that you’re a spammer and your mails don’t reach your subscribers?

Apparently there are over 4,000 words that the junk filters regard as indicators of spam. Naturally, the email service providers don’t publish these but Microsoft gives us some clues. You might be suprised at just how innocuous some of them are. For example:

How many legitimate emails might contain ‘removal instructions’ in their body text? Surely that’s a reasonable indicator of compliance with the requirement to offer an ‘unsubscribe’ option?

Put ‘advertisement’ in your subject and you could be junked too. Again, what if you’re an advertising agency seeking approval for some ‘advertisement copy’?

Send an email from your Sales department and put ’sales@xyzdomain.co.uk’and you’re flagging spam. Other ‘From’ names that Microsoft regards as suspicious include ‘mail’, ’success’ and ‘hello’.

Direct marketers often use terms such as ‘money back, cards accepted, free, guarantee, order now, order today and special promotion’ because they’re proven to lift response. Granted, some direct marketers are spammers but not all.

So how do you create effective emails without getting dumped in Junk?

1. Avoid the spam cliches.
2. Get your subscribers to ‘white-list’ you.
3. Create unique and original headlines and content.
4. Monitor your ‘open’ rates and watch out for any unusual drops. Check the emails that cause the drops and look for what be inferred as spam.

You can see some of Microsoft’s junk keywords here

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 1st, 2010 at 2:47 pm and is filed under Marketing Services, Online Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.