Three Ways to Reduce Your Spam From Mass Emailing

Many legitimate mass emails don't make it to the recipient's inbox. Here's a few tips to avoid all your hard work going to waste.

Internet service providers and email services everywhere are now deploying numerous methods to prevent spam messages from reaching people's inboxes. While this is a great tool in the fight against spam, the problem is that very often, legitimate commercial messages may end up in the recipient's junk mail folder instead of their inbox, and sometimes they don't even get delivered at all. If your company uses email marketing, there are certain things that you should know in order to increase your inbox rate, and thus increase the chances that the messages will actually be read by their intended recipients. 

Here are three ways to do so: 

Don't use purchased lists

You will sometimes see list of emails that are being sold by various companies and by users on online marketing and business forums. While in most cases the subscriber did at one point opt in to receive promotional messages when they signed up for a certain product or service, these emails lists are often a lot more trouble than they're worth. Chances are, the email addresses contained in them have already been sold to several different marketers. Also, the recipient may have simply entered their email when signing up for a certain website, contest, etc. and even if they indicated a preference for certain types of products and services, it doesn't mean that they would be interested in buying anything from you. 

Furthermore, these lists are often full of dead email addresses as well. Therefore, sending mass emails to email addresses that you got from a list isn't recommended. Very often your messages will end up in the junk mail folder. But also, you risk being branded as a spammer, even if you otherwise comply with all rules and regulations pertaining to sending mass email. 

Watch the content of your messages

Spam filters do an analysis of the message in an effort to determine whether it's probably a legitimate message or spam. One of the factors that spam filters base themselves on is the content of the message. Overusing words such as: free, discount, promo, buy now, make money, etc. is likely to result in your message being flagged as junk. 

Furthermore, if you're promoting affiliate offers, you should be careful to only promote legitimate ones, as there may be certain sites that were already flagged as being “spammy” and will trip up the spam filter of many email providers. 

Ask subscribers to whitelist you

If you have your own email list, one of the best ways to avoid the junk mail folder is simply by asking subscribers to whitelist your “from” email address. You can remind them of this on your website or in your welcome email. It's important to do this, even if some people will forget or not take the effort to add you to the whitelist. This is because it will ensure that all your further messages will end up in the recipient's inbox, rather than the junk folder. 

Dewitt Medlock is a real estate agent with a passion for marketing and technology. Dewitt uses the internet to market himself and grow his business. Search engine optimization, mass email, and pay per click advertising are three of his favorite online marketing techniques.