About 5% of e-mails are blocked by spam filters. Filters are very much sophisticated that it can be made to delete an e-mail with “bad words”. Actually while going through some articles with regard to e-mail marketing, I got some tips, which I’d love to share with you. You might have noted that many of your important mails to your clients/ target audience are drastically flagged as spam. Some filters look for patterns and add or delete points for certain points. If we learn to subtract points in a filter, we can build up a better e-mail marketing strategy.
You may find some points that are least important, but surely I can say this will provide some useful tips to you. Now, let me come to the points to be remembered while doing e-mail marketing.
Certain listservers have developed a bad reputation for sending spam. If the e-mail is being detected by these, it will add points to your spam score. If your e-mail address contains @ email-publisher.com or if you employ any free web hosting services commonly used by spammers, it will also add points to your spam score. So the first thing you have to take care is to avoid listservers used by spammers. The desktop e-mailing software used by spammers is penalized from 3.0 to 2.0.
Capital letters are found to be more spammy. Excess capital letters cost you .21. If you are using more upper case letters, you will be penalized for that. You may limit your capitalization to partial lines for avoiding this.
If your HTML message has more specific formatting with more than 50% HTML tags, you will have to pay again for that. So, better keep your HTML simple. If your mail contains stylized formats, it will reduce your score. According to my opinion, the following points will increase your spam score. But I can’t say that you should avoid these things:
• HTML table with thick border
• JavaScript contained in the message.
• HTML form in your e-mail.
• Links without an http:// prefix cost much.
• Don't link to URLs using IP address numbers instead of a domain.
High art will cost you highly. If you use special font colors that aren't in the palette of 217 web safe colors, it will cost 30 points. Hidden letters also cost you very much. The cost of different colors is as follows:
Black-- 0
Blue-- .21
Red-- .32
Grey-- .33
Green-- .41
Cyan-- .41
Yellow-- .42
Unknown color-- .42
Magenta-- .44
Black colors are safe, but since it is not that attractive, you can try to avoid it using it in font tags. Using a background color other than white will take your 0.317 points. Fonts larger than +2 or size 3 cost you 0.34 points. You may probably use HTML headers in the future rather than font tags to increase font size.
SpamAssassin also take immediate action against certain subject lines.
• Contains “FREE” in CAPS ------- 0.43
• Starts with dollar amount ------- 1.10
• GUARENTEED------- 0.62
• Starts with “Free” ------- 0.30
• Starts with "Hello" ----- 1.58
• To: username at front of subject------ 2.86
• Subject includes a question mark or exclamation point----- 0.10
• Subject contains lots of white space----- 2.64
• Subject is all in capitals-------0.48
• Subject talks about savings----- 0.41
• Subject talks about losing pounds-----0.51
• Subject is missing------- 0.34
Some more tips are to be discussed under the same topic. We will see more e-mail marketing tips in the next blog by Web India Solutions.Image may be NSFW.
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