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Jim how do you tell if you are a spammer?
If people click “mark as spam” on your email, you are a spammer as far as that person is concerned. Spam is in the eye of the beholder.
How Spam Filters Work
- Before we give you tips on how to avoid spam filters we should talk about how they work.
- How does gmail know a spam message from a real one?
- First it looks at the outside of the envelope trying to answer the question “do I trust the sender”
- Is the senders domain reputable?
- Is the sender’s server IP address in a bad neighborhood?
- Has this person opened or responded to emails from this sender before?
- Is the sender’s address in the address book?
- Second it reads the email to see if looks like spam.
- Is the HTML clean?
- Is it one big image?
- Is there a plain text copy?
- Does it smell like spam?
Tip 1 Double Opt in
Tip 2 One Click Unsubscribe
Tip 3 Send at least once per quarter
Tip 4 Write Intriguing (and non spammy) Subjects
Tip 5 Avoid Bad Words
- Free
- 100% Satisfied
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- Pills
- click here
- Google: Spam Trigger Words
Tip 6 Use a Trusted Sender
- MailChimp
- Aweber
- Hubspot
Tip 7 Avoid Using All Caps
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So tempting to spam this podcast to the author of the “marketing book” recommending writers use her tactic of harvesting email addresses from Goodreads giveaways and adding them to her opt-in email list.
No, she obviously doesn’t understand the meaning of the words “opt in”. Or that harvesting email addresses from Goodreads giveaways is strictly against their terms of service.
Yes, I opted out of her email list.
Thanks for a great podcast and for the information. As annoying as spam is to me, I’ve never thought about the consequences of being seen as a spammer. I’m especially encouraged at the tip on emailing frequency. For the longest time, I sent out newsletters when I had something to talk about. That usually mean years passed between newsletters.
But I recently moved and redesigned my blog. Part of the overall package was a decision to begin publishing a newsletter once a quarter, so I was delighted to have that decision validated.
The next best tip was the spam language tip. It’s the “new thing learned” today.
Thanks again and best wishes,
Carrie