We all get far more spam than mail we actually want to receive, so we protect ourselves with ever more complex spam filters, in an attempt to stem the flow of dating offers, male genital improvers and get rich quick schemes into our inboxes.

These spam filters are of course an industry in themselves and as the vast majority of email is spam, they occasionally get it wrong. Here are some pointers to avoid this happening to your mailings.

Content is first

As it is usually the area most within the control of the person conducting the email campaign, content is the simplest to fix. There are the obvious rules to follow – don’t put words like SALE or offer in the email, but there are also a whole host of HTML formatting guidelines that can cause you issues. For example, having too many images with not enough words, or having poor quality HTML code can get you junked.

Thankfully, there is a simple way to check if you have any issues.

SpamAssasin is the largest content filtering network there is and most ESP’s plug into them to provide a view as to what content needs to be changed to maximise delivery. So if your ESP has that functionality use it, but don't just use it on the first send and then forget about it. Spammers are constantly changing what they do and so Spam filters are updated to match, what was acceptable yesterday may not be today. If you aren’t using an ESP there are some tools which plug in to SpamAssasin which you can use on their own.

What's your IP Reputation?

Each email has an IP address attached to it that tells the recipient's ISP which mail server sent the email. The ISP can then check its own records and those of 3rd parties to see if the IP has a good reputation. This reputation is based on previous actions from that mail server. The logic goes, that if you have spammed people before you are likely to continue to do so.

A simple way to check if your IP address is causing you issues is to send a plain text email to a new account (hotmail, yahoo or AOL). If it goes into the junk, the chances are that the IP you are sending from has a bad reputation.

Do you suspect your ESP is sending your mails through poor quality IP address ranges? If the answer's yes, you should confront them and ask how they manage their IP’s and whether you are on shared or a dedicated IP address range. Any account manager should be able to answer these queries – if they don’t alarm bells should start ringing.

Domain Reputation

As well as your IP getting a bad reputation, your domain can also be a cause for concern for ISP’s. Domain reputations are a little more clear cut. Your IP’s are generally black listed or they aren't.

How do you find out?

There are plenty of tools out there that will monitor your domain, then email you if there is a problem. If you don’t need or want constant monitoring, blacklistalert.org is a simple and comprehensive checker. Just type in your domain to see if there are any issues you need to worry about. If you are on a black list and you don’t think you should be, contact the operator of the list. They are usually very good at letting you know why you are on their list and what you need to do to get off it.

Don't take risk with Data Hygiene

Rule #1 Only email people who have opted in to receive your emails, or those people who have opted to get emails from 3rd parties. No point in getting everything else right, if you then send your perfect email to people who haven’t opted in.

When buying a list, look out for large numbers of generic email addresses, this is usually an indication of a poor quality list. Generic email addresses (sales@, info@) are most likely to be captured by email harvesting programs, and besides anything else, have a terrible response rate.

There is an ongoing debate as to whether you should continue to email non responders, but that’s an article in itself! However you should of course suppress bounced or unsubscribes from future sends.

Once you get the above basics right, you can then start to build on this foundation to run email campaigns with the highest response rates possible.

That’s what we’ll be covering next month......