Posts Tagged ‘email spam’

Increase Email Deliverability

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

You’d be amazed if you saw the spam numbers of today. About 70 per cent of all e-mail sent is spam; furthermore, there are more than 14 billion unwanted email letters sent each day and spam generates annual losses of about $20b. These numbers are the reason behind the drastic spam filtering of today, and numerous businesses have become weary about the delivery of their newsletters.

Few Tips to Increase Email Deliverability

email deliverabilityThe most secure way of reassuring email delivery is to have clients manually add you to their address book. However, it seldom happens with regular customers. It is, however, important that you mention that they should add you to your address book for the simple reason that it can save emails. Mention something among lines like ‘Add us (company@email.com) to your address book in order to ensure delivery. Thank you!’ in your subscription form.

E-mail providers know about mailing lists and will allow your emails to go through unharmed if it appears that the subscriber has manually subscribed to the list.

  • Mentioning the subscriber’s name in the subject line is crucial, as personalized emails are rarely thought to be spam.
  • Among other possible things to ask, be sure to ask for the recipient’s name when he signs up.

Owners of more sizable lists have to be cautious; if numerous recipients of your emails mark your email as spam, you can start losing customer trust-and your email address can become blacklisted. Blacklisted email addresses can be automatically marked as spam by email providers and ISPs.

To avoid blacklisting…

  • be sure to provide an opt-out link;
  • send only relevant content;
  • don’t send it to people who haven’t subscribed to your list; et cetera.

However, blacklisting for newsletters is very rare and you can get your sender’s IP removed from the blacklist if you provide evidence that you only send email to your subscribers.

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Posted in Email Deliverability | 1 Comment »

Words NOT to Use and Avoid in Emails

Thursday, May 6th, 2010

There are words that are boring for the subscriber, and interesting for the spam filter. To insure interesting emails that are more likely to be opened and received, not only you must write good headlines and interesting copy. You must also avoid words that are likely to be dismissed by the client, or make your email spammy–which means that many clients won’t receive it at all.

email-spam-words

To make your email attractive to the client, as a rule, use the active tense in your writing; in short, write sentences that have power. Active sentences look better than passive sentences. It may not be so evident, but ‘Cats love salmon’ sounds better than ‘Salmon is loved by cats’. Using the active voice eliminates many other problems, too. Rambling is a good example (rambling can be said to be present in this sentence). Use of active voice for email marketing is key, as it calls to action.

To make your emails slip through the spam filters, avoid using bad words. Not only are these words disliked by the spam filter, they also suck up the value of your content in the eyes of the subscriber.

Keep in mind:

  • Avoid words like “Free; Discount; Act Now; 50% off; You’ve been selected; All Natural”.
  • Also avoid words that relate to the particular email. Phrases like “Don’t Delete; Read This; Urgent; See What’s Inside; etc” are bad marketing practice and can severely damage your brand.
  • And, of course, unless you plan to gather a mailing list for selling Viagra (what?) or other drugs, avoid such brand names entirely. Also, avoid extensive use of !!/$$/&&/** or other symbols. They look unprofessional and spammy.

The problem behind these words is simple. They are disliked for their misleading and overused ways. If you can’t avoid using such words, limit them to one occasion per email. Using synonyms is a lot better.

Overall, there aren’t that many words you shouldn’t say, there are more bad emailing practices that you should avoid. Remember that attractive content is a good start, avoid the passive voice and bad words, and you’ll see that your emails have a better clickthrough rate.

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Posted in Email Deliverability, Tips & Tricks | 4 Comments »

Be cool, don’t SPAM

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

The definition of email spam is “Unsolicited commercial email”. As an email user, you will encounter less and less email spam because most, if not all, internet service providers (ISPs) and email service providers (ESPs) are well aware that these email spam messages became such a threat to all the users as well as their own servers.

Let’s talk about email SPAM a little bit more.

spamIt is obvious that spam email messages are unsolicited. This is because you have never allowed the sender to send any message to your inbox. You are not familiar with the senders and most of all you do not want to be familiar with them. They are unknown to you, but surely, they keep on sending their email to you everyday without asking you for permission. Spammers know that if their email messages are exposed to, let’s say, one million people in just one click. They would have more chance to sell their product through this channel. Though, you might wonder, how can this possibly be harmful to my email account? No, if the messages are only intended to persuade to purchase their product. But we all know that these messages are sometime include small programs that may be automatically downloaded to your computer, these small programs are also known as viruses and/or worms.

Once your computer is infected, these small programs will intrude your email accounts and send out email messages to all your contacts. Thus, you became a spammer yourself. This is why spam messages in certain countries are illegal and sending out spam is considered as a crime. Also, both ISPs and ESPs do know that spammers intrude email accounts. This is why they are equipped with spam filters.

What are Spam filters?

Spam filters are programs that set to separate out all unsolicited email messages that are being sent from unknown users. Spam filters nowadays are very sensitive because spammers are always finding a way to get over these filters (which is why they are making this as sensitive as possible).

Can we get around or over the spam filters?

This answer is no, we can not get around or over the spam filters. Rigorously, the only way is we have to get through them. So as an email marketer, you would have to strictly follow the criteria so that you email messages are not ended up in a junk email folder.

Design your email messages

Before you start to design your email messages, we would like you to log on your email account and check out your junk email folder. See how these spammers designed their email messages and keep these designs in mind.

We do not want you to follow the spammer designs because what they do with their messages make these messages wind up in your junk email folder.

When you prepare your Email Campaign, check for these common SPAM mistakes:

  • Keep your text clean. This would also show your professionalism. You do not need a lot of coloring in your text. Keep them in the same format and style. Spam filters are easily triggered when your font is madly colored.
  • The use of exclamation marks and uppercase letters. Unnecessary use of exclamation marks!!!!!!!!!! and UPPERCASE LETTERS would SET OFF the SPAM FILTERS!!!!!!!!!!.
  • Bellow are some examples of the words that should not be used when you are creating your email campaign. You can guess which other words should not be used by reviewing the spam email from your junk email folder.
    • Mortgage
    • Viagra
    • Loan
    • Free
    • Click here
    • Limited time
    • Final reduction
    • Saving
  • Your HTML coding skill is very important. Your HTML coding must be clean as spam filters are checking how neat your HTML coding is. The code may be hidden to the user but spam filters can view your HTML code and your email message will get delivered directly to your junk email folder if your coding is poor, Mailigen system does all the HTML cleaning work for you, but still make sure if you are importing your Email Templates they are well coded.
  • Dummy text (Lorem Ipsum) are widely used by web designers to and email marketer to fill all these dummy text into their webpage or a test campaign to focus on the visual, rather than the content, of a website or an email. If you are sending an email campaign using “lorem ipsum” your email will automatically redirect to the junk email folder.
  • Using the word “test” in the subject line will get your email thrown into junk email folder.
  • We know that beautiful graphics and pictures are important to the email campaign. However, if your email campaign is only filled up with graphics and pictures (no text), spam filters will detect this.


Be cool, don’t SPAM!!!


Read more here about Mailigen ANTI-SPAM Policy

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Posted in Email Deliverability | 3 Comments »

The Six Key Rules not to be identified as SPAM

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

Unsolicited, unwanted, junk or spam email messages is the term used to describe email messages that customers don’t want.
Before sending any email to an existing or potential client you should understand clearly how to follow the Rules and not be identified as Spam by us or other email providers.

In-depth definition of SPAM you may as well find here on WikiPedia.

There are six basic email marketing previsions that you must follow in order for your e-mail marketing to be efficient and not to be identified as unsolicited commercial emails.

The Six Key Rules not to be identified as SPAM

  1. The email message can not contain misleading email header information.
  2. The email can not contain misleading Title and Subject line.
  3. The email sender must be existing return email address.
  4. All unsubscribed emails must be removed within 10 business days after unsubscribing.
  5. Any commercial email must have the company name and postal address of the sender.
  6. Unsolicited advertising messages must have clear identification of being commercial message and has clear notice for the recipient to unsubscribe from your recipient list.

Technical terms described in points 2, 4 and 5 are taking care of by Mailigen and are performed automatically, in this way e-mails correspond to all the technical criteria stated in the rule.

We, at Mailigen, are making sure that your e-mails which are sent from our system include automatic unsubscribe link as well as the name of your company and the address. Your job however is to make sure that your e-mail contains valuable information for your client, and that it is not unsolicited electronic advertising thus you will make your recipient pleased with the content you have provided, which means that your e-mail won’t be declined yet the first time you send it.

Mailigen automatically purges your e-mail database from unsubscribed e-mails and dead e-mail addresses giving you detailed reports on that. The whole process is fully computerized and it doesn’t need your implication whatsoever.

In order to get more information about Mailigen’s SPAM policy, please read Mailigen’s Anti-Spam regulations or contact us at any time.

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Posted in Email Deliverability | No Comments »