Don't Let Your Email Marketing Turn to Spam

Remember when SPAM used to be just gushy ham mixed with who knows what in a can?

Anyway data from Symantec (the Internet spam experts) shows that more than 30% of marketers who send out queries by email don’t even know their deletion rates. Not good.

For all of us who are spammed to death an interesting aside – in its most recent report Symantec detailed where most spam comes from. Here’s a breakdown:

U.S. – 26%
Brazil – 16%
China – 14%
Poland – 9%
South Korea – 8%
Germany - 7%
Turkey – 6%
Other – 24%

So the U.S. leads in spam generation – not surprising considering how much we all get. Want to get past the filters with your marketing materials? This post is dedicated to helping you do a better job of getting email into the hands of customers and prospects.

I talked to Pete Leibman, of TMA List Brokerage and Management who wrote a white paper on the topic. Here’s his advice.

Don’t include attachments in your emails – they often draw a false positive from spam filters.

Make your opt out button highly visible – put it at the top of messages. A simple, visible opt-out process often makes spam complaints less likely.

Create an email feedback loop – Marketers need to create (and monitor) an “abuse” email address such as buse@companydomain.com. For example, IBM’s address could be abuse@ibm.com or Verizon’s might be abuse@verizon.com. This is the default email address that ISPs use to communicate with email senders when email recipients have reported messages as spam to ISPs.

Test your content before you send. Run your content through a spam filter, such as Spam Assassin, before sending. This process can highlight content in your message that may lead to tagging it as spam.