Email Marketing - Getting Past the Spam Filters

"Email Marketing 101, Part 3: How to Get Your Emails Past the Spam Filters and into the Hands of Your Prospects"

If you've been doing email marketing for very long, you may be wondering what in the world has happened to your response rates lately.

Are people simply no longer buying online? Is the market "saturated" with your program or product? Is email marketing no longer a valid method for promotion?

If you are buying your leads from a leads company, you may suddenly be seeing many more undeliverables. Does that mean they are selling you bad leads?

In most cases, the answer to the above questions is a resounding NO!

The answer is much simpler: your emails are being hit and deleted by multiple spam filters.

It is estimated that between 40-70% of ALL email is getting zapped BEFORE anyone ever has a chance to read it. Notice that I said ALL, folks. Not just the viaagra and male enlargement spam that is clogging your inbox every day (I get 200+ of these ads every day). But legitimate email messages that the prospect has asked to receive!

It doesn't matter how many times you opt someone in to your list. If the messages you send hit one of these spam filters, it doesn't get through.

Almost all of the large ISP's and email services use spam filters. Some, like AOL, are much worse than others.

Many, like Yahoo and Hotmail, move emails they deem as spam into a Bulk Email folder. But the latest version of AOL, which just came out, goes farther than any others - it not only doesn't deliver your emails at all - but it sends them back to you as undeliverable. If you're buying leads, you may think that you've been cheated.

You haven't been cheated, folks. You've simply been victimized by AOL's draconian anti-spam policies.

Incidentally, if you're trying to do business online with an AOL address, you're going to have a very difficult time. You will likely never receive your company's newsletter, or any other newsletters you subscribe to. You'll never receive emails letting you know that you've made a sale or sponsored a member. If you want to do business online, you simply MUST get an email address that delivers ALL your email.

At the very least, use your address book to add the email address of every program you belong to and every newsletter you subscribe to.

Many of the anti-spam filters in use by the large ISP's classify an email as spam based on the number of "trigger words" they find in your email. That would certainly include words like "viagra" and "male enlargement."

Many filters zap an email if the sender uses all caps in the subject line. Or strange characters, such as "@#^." Common marketing phrases frequently trigger filters. In short, there can be hundreds of rules in a spam filter, and hundreds of words to avoid.

Unfortunately, spam filters hurt legitimate marketers, not just the spammers they are targetted at. That means that any time you use email for marketing, you must be very sure that what you are sending doesn't trigger these spam filters.

So what can you do to get your legitimate messages past these filters?

First, you should be prepared to check every letter and every autoresponder message series you send. You will probably have to rewrite every one of them.

That may sound like a lot of work. But I would be willing to bet that if you took the time rewriting your marketing letters, that you will find them much better than they were to start with! If you are simply using the same sample letters that hundreds of other people are using, your response rate isn't going to be that great to start with.

You must always be willing to make changes to the way you market online. Nothing online stays effective forever. You must continue to learn and modify what you are doing.

I include sample followup letters on all my member support sites. But those are "sample" letters. You should never use them exactly as written. Online network marketing programs change and add upgrades frequently. Your marketing letters should reflect that. Plus, these letters don't tell your prospects who YOU are and what YOU will do for them when they join under your sponsorship. They have none of YOUR personality included in them.

Add to that hundreds of other people using the very same letter, and you'll find that your response rate gets stale pretty quickly. The sample letters on my sites are STARTING POINTS. Use my samples for ideas about what to put into your own followup letters.Then take those letters, modify them, put YOUR personality into them, and run a spam-fliter check on them. Keep rewriting them until your spam score is very low. THEN your response rate should go way up!

Site-Sell offers a free service that will help you do that. You just send each of your emails to them, and they score it against the known spam filters. You can then rework your email to keep it from triggering the filters.

SITE-SELL SPAM CHECK TOOL

Using the instructions below, send your message for a spam-check to:

spamcheck-website@sitesell.net

STEP 1: Copy-and-paste your subject, but start your subject with the word "TEST" (without the quotes, in UPPER CASE) so that they know this is a test e-mail. (If the subject does NOT start with TEST, they'll assume it's REAL spam and delete it).Here's a sample subject...

TESTFlower-Lovers Ezine #007: Peonies for the Yukon

STEP 2: Copy-and-paste the rest of your message and simply send it, exactly the way you would send it to your recipient, to:

spamcheck-website@sitesell.net

STEP 3: Once you get your spamcheck report, modify your letter using the suggestions and try it again.

E-FILTRATE

Another service is E-FILTRATE. This service does cost, but it also has the most tools for making sure your emails get delivered. This is the "industrial strength" spam filter- buster for serious email marketers who send out a lot of email every year.

Even if you don't want to order E-Filtrate, however, you should go to their site and signup for their email course "The 21 Deadliest spam Filter Violations! How to get your email through the spam Filters by avoiding them." It's excellent, and will help you a lot when you are rewriting your messages. Just Click Here

More Email Marketing Resources:

"How To Create Powerful, Money-Making Autoresponder Letters For Your Business in Just 3½ Minutes - Without Writing!" Even if you can’t write and don’t think you have a creative bone in your body you can create powerful, money-making autoresponders for your business - just by filling in a few blanks - 100% Guaranteed! Get these exclusive pre-done autoresponder templates now and be making money tomorrow.

"Million Dollar Emails" How to Create Powerful, Money-Making Emails to sell any product or service... 100% Guaranteed. New resource reveals the insider secrets the top Internet pros are using to create a fortune online with email marketing. Now available at your fingertips - an entire arsenal of powerful, money-making emails to model, study and learn from - guaranteed to help sell more of your product or service! Winning emails that sell like crazy! Don't spend another minute struggling to write your own series without this powerful resource.

"The Insider Secrets to E-mail Marketing" by million-dollar internet marketer Corey Rudl. This 433-page printable eBook is literally an A-to-Z guide, crammed full of step-by-step instructions, examples, and case studies of absolutely everything you need to know to explode your e-mail campaigns. The so-called "experts" are NERVOUS... Corey is giving away his most advanced e-mail marketing secrets - stuff that even they don't know about! So for the first time ever you can... "Snowball your income with the SAME step-by-step strategies he used to earn $213,705 and generate 41,409 new subscribers... in the last 30 days alone!"