Demand Generation Machine

Just as gatekeepers can be a tele-marketers nightmare, the spam filter can be the email marketers boogeyman. Millions of carefully crafted B2B email messages sit in the spam boxes of executives laptops and machines every single day and fail to fulfill its purpose. Most of you would agree that spam filters are a necessary evil and personally I don’t believe I would be able to live without one. With the volume of junk emails that pour into our inboxes everyday it only makes sense that these spam filters tighten the criteria and handle incoming mail more strictly even if it means that one or two legitimate emails are sacrificed in the process.

B2B email marketing campaigns still play a crucial role in B2B lead generation strategies and that is not going to change anytime soon. They can be expensive, require careful consideration and thought to execute well and can be disappointing when you’ve done everything right and the only reader was a piece of software code which scanned your email, identified a few trends and confined your email to that horrible place marked “SPAM or JUNK“. The only thing email marketers can do to get their message across is understand the reasons their emails are being filtered out and keep a step ahead by making sure they do everything to avoid being filtered.

Some tips to evade that junkmail folder :-

-Make sure your emails are sent from an authorized service provider or a server that has not been black listed

- Avoid using words or language patterns that are typically found in bulk-mail or common spam

- Choose your subject line wisely and make sure it does not come across like an unsolicited advertisement or a subject line typically used in bulk mail

- Avoid too many links within the email body and use them only where required. Links are often frowned on by most spam filters

-Avoid attachments as far as possible since attachments are the amongst the first things a filter would scan for a s a virus threat

-Stick to using plain text as much as possible while drafting emails, HTML emails are more likely to get filtered

-Avoid adding more than 2-3 emails in the BCC section, large number of BCC’d mails are trademarks of spammers

-Here is a great list of words “not to use” in your emails “Click Here”

- Test your final draft, send it to people you know, use a tool like Content Checker to do a dry run and if its still being filtered take another crack at the draft

Try some of these tips the next time you send out an email campaign. The only way to stay ahead of those pesky spam filters is understand how they work and then work around them. Happy marketing!