Nett Knowledge Blog

A common question I hear is ‘will my emails go into junk boxes?’

Well, if you fill them with junk then I’d hope so!  Junk filters exist to make our lives easier, protect our computers and weed out malevolent or inappropriate content.  However, sometimes perfectly innocent and relevant emails get caught up by the algorithms that decide what’s groovy and what’s not and it can be for all manner of unexpected reasons.

An example would be if you’re launching a brand new product, one that has years of development behind it and has taken a considerable investment to get to this point. You obviously have created an email marketing campaign for it, as part of your strategy in spreading the word. So you create an email that’s neat, concise and fresh to make sure that your clients get the great news without difficulty. Then, it goes straight into your junk folder.

Ensuring Quality Bulk Email Marketing:

In this phase, there are several evident points that you can double check:

    * Profanity (even innocent words that can potentially be taken the wrong way)
    * Extreme use of punctuation marks such as exclamation points
    * Too much variety of colors and sizes in the content
    * Oversized or excessive numbers of images
    * Hyperlinks linking to doubtful sites
    * Suspicious or too hard sell sounding subject lines

The collective result of the minor SpamBugs usage (on their own shouldn’t actually cause any issues) here and there, unfortunately is the source of junking; otherwise, it should be fairly uncomplicated to mark a lone, obvious occurrence of the examples above as the clear culprit. For that reason, it makes the testing process VITAL.

There are a lot of companies that offer 3rd party products or support that can test how spam-like your email is going to appear to several different inboxes. Remember though, this process should only be utilized as a first line of defense. It is better to heed the slogan that we actually use, “TEST, TEST and TEST again”--- there is simply no other alternative for it. As a proven method, it is very critical to make sure that you’ve produced a high-quality job the correct way. Take the time out to do a bit of research by exploring Gmail and Hotmail (or other big, web-based email providers), and creating accounts specifically for email testing. It will open your eyes to the enormous advantage that you will be adding to your email campaign strategies, as well as providing you with the end results that you hope to accomplish.

    * Produce the email
    * Do a trial on various inboxes
    * Modify and re-test as needed