Anyone with the minimum of a pre-school education will tell you that in order to defeat your enemy, you must first know him very well. In the case of email marketing, your enemy is the spam email filter. Overzealous, discriminatory, discerning, adaptable and powerful the email filter stands in between you and a reader and like Helen Keller they don’t know the difference between an honest Abe like yourself and a sweepstakes offer. While it is not possible to destroy that enemy- there are definitely ways to maneuver around him.

Think back to the spam that you have received before. The subject line usually includes variations of the words free offer urgent now amazing buy why from home oppurtunity etc etc with a combination of bad spacing grammar CAPS and punctuation. Your subject shouldn’t be a question or an exclamation. So the first step would be to never write in that tone those are the easiest identifiers for filters so leave the caps and colors in the newspaper circulars where they belong.

That’s the easy stuff, now you have to deal with the “to” and “from” fields and the body of the message. First use an easily identifiable sending address instead of weird alpha or numeric addresses or a jumbled combination of both because it’s screaming to be canned. A missing send-to field or subject line is a bad sign as are multiple cc’s, bcc’s and addresses similar to the recievers, even emails sent to mailing lists are being directed to the junk bin.

The bad thing is that you’ve spent time creating a campaign and list of people who have actually opted in to receive your information, but the spam filter doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo because its too busy blocking you. Though someone may have opted in, spam filters will sort your mail for the aforementioned characteristics placing permissioned emails with the unpermissioned spam. More often than not, the real spam is delivered to the inbox and your legitimate mail doesn’t even make the final cut.

You may be tempted to copy an email template, but the more genuine and personal the email is, the less of a chance it has at getting spammed to the nearest junk bin. Though you can’t personally write 10,000 emails you can still make a non-machinic one without being too commercial or too personal.

But remember, spam filters are ever-evolving on the behest of readers who now report spam allowing the filter to learn, adjust and adapt. With spammers trying to sound more like legitimate people and legitimate senders trying to sound less like spammers its becoming harder to distinguish the two in this electronic cat and mouse game. In the end, with ever changing protocols and filters, there is no magic bullet that will increase the chances of your mail being delivered especially with spammers, spam filters and people becoming more adept at detecting spam

And even if it was a solution, you still have to convince the reader to actually read your message.

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