I have some very important information for you today about running an effective e-mail newsletter campaign.

The biggest culprit to killing the effectiveness of your e-mail campaign is Spam filters.

As you know, Spam is a horrible reality businesses have to do deal with everyday. It fills your in-box with offers for products and services you don’t want nor need and keeps you from effectively communicating with people you actually need to correspond with.

Because of this, e-mail software such as Outlook, Eudora, Apple Mail etc. have pretty strict Spam filters in-place. Additionally, online services such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! and Web hosting services have also implemented strict Spam filters.

To take this one step further, if you’re using an email management system like AWeber (which I highly recommend) they will also analyze your emails prior to sending so you will have a better idea if the email will actually make it to your recipients.

One such popular Spam filtering tool called SpamAssassin™ is used to check your message and display any key areas that are being caught by the filter.

Essentially, any score under 3 is okay. 3-5 not so good. And anything over a 5… well, don’t expect anyone to receive your message.

The thing to note is that the scores are used to determine if your message “appears” to be Spam, not that it actually is. But if it “thinks” it is, chances are pretty good your message will go directly to the Spam box.

Tips for reducing your email newsletter Spam score

In order to have any chance of having an effective e-mail campaign, your e-mails need to have a pretty low Spam filter score.

Tips To Reduce Email Newsletter Spam Score

Here are three quick tips to help reduce your email Spam score. In fact, if you follow these tips you may get your Spam score down to zero.

1. Don’t Use Initial Caps In The Subject Line

Even worse, never use ALL CAPS. This immediately flags Spam filters and your intended recipients will see your message as some sort of business related email — and not in a good way. By the way, using all caps is also poor email etiquette.

You see, using initial caps is generally used for business correspondence because it’s more formal. This is why so many promotional email subject lines written this way. It’s also the reason why you’re more inclined to immediately trash the message without even reading it.

A better way to write your email subject lines is in all lowercase because this is how friends write to each other. As grammatically incorrect this might be, friends don’t bother with formality. Not only do Spam filters understand this, you inherently do too, and are more likely to open an email written in this manner.

For example. Which email would you be more likely to open?

Email Subject Line A:
Special Discount – Get 10% OFF Your Next Purchase At WidgetDepot

Email Subject Line B:?
check out this cool deal on widgetdepot

2. Remove High Score Spam Words

There are specific words and characters that, if used in an email subject line, will immediately increase your email Spam score. These include words like “free”, “call now” and characters such as the dollar sign “$“. All of which will trigger Spam filters.

To see more email stop words, you can download this PDF. You can also Google “list of Spam filter trigger words” to see more stop words as I’m sure more and more are being added everyday.

3. Don’t Use Full URLs as Anchor Text

Pay close attention to this tip because it’s very important.

When including a link in your e-mail, make sure the linked text is not the full website address of the actual URL. It should not look like this.

https://www.kristofcreative.com

The reason for this is because if you’re using an online e-mail service like AWeber to manage your e-mail campaigns, they will convert the URL into an internal URL they can track it. Your link then looks something like this;

go to our website

Now, that the linked text isn’t a URL, there’s no more matching issues to contend with and your Spam score will be lower.

What You Can Expect To See

Although there are many additional items that can trigger Spam filters (such as including attachments) the above three tips are the quickest and easiest to implement. And I guarantee you, they do work. I was able to reduce 98% of my emails to a ZERO Spam score. The other 2% had a Spam score of 0.2. Of course, your results may vary, but at least they will be better than they were.

As I’ve mentioned above, the object is to decrease (or completely eliminate) your email newsletters Spam score. Because the lower your email Spam score, the greater chance your e-mail has of making through to your email list–and the more effective your email campaign will become.

Best of luck with your email campaign. And if you have any email tips you’d like to share, please post them below.