If sending email to a mailing list is part of
your marketing or business building strategy, you want to make
sure your messages are reaching your audience. But is your email marketing effective? Are your readers getting
your emails?
Due to the proliferation of sp@m, ISPs (your web access and email provider) have
added content checkers to try to reduce the flow of unwanted mail. In principle
this is a good idea. In practice, lots of sp@m is still getting through and many
legitimate emails, possibly including yours, are being blocked.
You may assume that since your content is lëgitimatë and because you
only send messages to 0pt-in readers, your prospects and clients are getting
all of your emails. But presently sp@m filters are blocking emails that include
words such as:
Even to send this article to the people who've requested it, I’ve had to
write carefully and creatively to disguise these words to get them through the
sp@m filters.
In an effort to eliminate junk mail, most email providers have sp@m filters in
place, and, smart as these are, they don’t know you are not a sp@mmer if
it includes what it considers to be suspicious words. Some filters automatically
dump suspicious email into a bu1k mail folder, others block them entirely.
Chances are you don’t consider your email marketing to be sp@m, nor do you consider yourself a sp@mmer. You don’t blindly
send mi11ions of emails a day to people who don’t want your information.
You do respond to client inquiries and send information to people who request
it. Even if you only send email to people who have double optëd in for your
ezine, you can have your newsletter or message labeled as sp@m if you’re
not careful. 10-30% or more of your emails may be getting filtered by overzealous
ISPs.
Usually, use of just one "offensive" word won’t get your email
blocked, but repeat it or use it in conjunction with another "offensive" word
and your recipients won’t receive your articles or notes.
I hate junk email as much as the next person. But if the recipient has requested
your ezine or an email response, they should get it. In there effort to eliminate
sp@m, the ISPs are beginning to infringe on lëgitimatë communication
and commerce.
What You Can Do
Review available lists of words that ISPs consider "suspicioius". I’ve
posted one list of some innocuous and common words that if used together or frequently
can get your email blocked at: http://www.marketingforsuccess.com/wordstoavoid.html
Where possible, replace "offensive" words. If you need to use a word
like "markëting" because it’s the best word for the job,
you can get creative with, as I did above, but some sp@m filters block emails
containing odd characters.
No strategy for getting by the ISP filters is foolproof, but every effort you
make to eliminate potentially problematic words will increase the likelihood
that the people who want to read your emails will get them. Take a minute to
check your email before you send it and you’ll increase the number of people
who read it and respond to it.
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