Every month we'll be featuring a question sent in by one of our readers and asking you to contribute your thoughts and advice.

In September Emma from London asked: 'My customers are telling me that my campaigns keep going into their junk folder. I don't sell anything suspect or offer to lend money – so what am I doing wrong?'


Here's what our readers had to say:

The obvious stuff is to get people to put you in their address book, keep your list clean, cull non-responders, sign-up for all feedback loop schemes, suppress spam complainers straight away, make sure your ESP is giving you a clean IP address and use html (I find text emails go into spam more often than html ones).

Without seeing the emails and knowing which spam filters are causing problems, it’s hard to advise further. If it’s all spam filters, I’d consider rewriting the template (or maybe even throwing in the towel and try another line of business). I’d try to use ‘ham’ words (if anyone can tell us what 'ham words' are, drop us an email – ed) in the copy and try the email with a ‘ham’ subject.  Try to avoid emails with exactly one image, most of the proper spam I get contains exactly one image and my Bayesian Filter catches most of those. 

Ben, Data Media and Research Ltd, Sheffield

There are lots of reasons why this could be happening, but the top two causes are design and content. If your email design is poorly constructed and heavily image-based with lots of photos and images you are likely to be seen as spam. Failure to apply alt tags correctly in the design code is also a major cause that can see you ending up in the junk bin.

Secondly, spam/junk filters react badly to sales and marketing words. Anything like Free, Offer, Special, Win, Discount, Sale and Deal will set the alarm bells ringing, as will excessive use of £, $ and ! Try replacing words like free with complimentary.

If possible get in touch with the people on your list and ask them to find out why you have been blacklisted. There might be a very simple reason like their company has banned all messages like yours.

Suzie, Smart Monkey Marketing, Horsham

Encourage your e-mail subscribers to add you to their white list/safe list. Avoid common spam words like ‘Free’.

Joanna , ICSA Software International, London

 

 

August Q & A

 

In August Rob from Brighton asked: 'My company sends out a regular email newsletter to around 5,000 subscribers but every month since we started at least 10 people unsubscribe – what are we doing wrong?'

 

To view the responses to Rob's question click here.