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Make sure that your subject is relevant and not misleading, try and avoid unnecessary capitalisation, exclamation marks, and the word FREE – all these things will increase the proportion of your mails discarded as spam.

Keep your communications regular
Send out your informtion/offers on a regular basis – monthly usually works best, but depending on your sector and audience then weekly or even daily may be appropriate – but keep it consistent. Subscribers often come to anticipate your next newsletter, which is invaluable for you, but make sure you don’t let them down!

Spelling
Spell check your emails, there’s nothing worse than reading emails full of spelling mistakes and typo’s.

Involve your audience
Keep your audience interested by getting them involved – run competitions, surveys and Q&A sessions – anything that will get your audience engaged with your brand.

Provide value
Make sure that your emails contain add genuine value to your readers – don’t always go for the hard sell or you’ll rapidly lose many of your subscribers. If you can get your readers anticipating your emails because they value your insight then you’re already well on your way to creating lasting customer relationships.

In the ‘FROM’ line of your email keep the name consistent
Your subscribers will look for this when deciding what to read in their crowded inbox, so make sure you make it easy for them to find your newsletter by keeping the ‘from’ name the same in every edition. Don’t make it misleading or your email may be discarded as spam.

Frequently, more sophisticated anti-spam methods used by ISPs use a “point system” that identifies trigger phrases commonly used by Spam. If an email goes over the “points” it is filtered out, and is never delivered to a customer.

Some of the more commonly used phrases that ISPs and mail clients filter out include:

Free!
50% off!
Click Here
Call now!
Subscribe
Earn £
Discount!
Eliminate Debt
Double your income
You’re a Winner!
Reverses Aging
“Hidden”
Information you requested
“Stop” or “Stops”
Lose Weight

Multi level Marketing
Million Pounds
Opportunity
Compare
Removes
Collect
Amazing
Cash Bonus
Promise You
Credit
Loans
Satisfaction Guaranteed
Serious Cash
Search Engine Listings

There are other problematic phrases that can trigger some Spam filters, or start adding “Spam points” to emails sent out, and should be avoided. These include:

Act Now!
All New
All Natural
Avoid Bankruptcy
As Seen On…
Buy Direct
Casino
Cash
Consolidate Your Debt
Special Promotion
Easy Terms
Get Paid
Guarantee, Guaranteed
Great offer
Give it away, Giving it away
Join millions
Meet Singles
MLM
No cost, No fees

Offer
One time
Online pharmacy
Online marketing
Order Now
Please Read
Don’t Delete
Save up to
Time limited
Unsecured debt or credit
Vacation
Viagra
Visit our web site
While Supplies last
Why pay more?
Winner
Work at home
You’ve been selected

Using quotation marks, pound signs and exclamation points in subject lines will frequently trigger mail filters, as well as using all capital letters (shouting). You should also never put a 0800 number in the subject line, since that will also cause your email to be filtered out by many Spam filters. And never use a font size larger than 2+, or you could trigger some Spam filters.

Please be aware that the above lists aren’t meant to be comprehensive, and only identify some of the more common words and phrases that trigger Spam filters. One way to check? Send an email to yourself and some select friends with Spam filters first, before sending it out to your customers, and see if it makes it through. Or, go out and buy one of the better software programs that will highlight words that could be identified as Spam. If you depend on email marketing to bring traffic to your web site, it is well worth the investment.

It’s always nice to be greeted by name.

Personalising your email or SMS greeting with the recipient’s name is a great way to get their attention and show that you’ve made an effort to treat them as an individual. Provided you’ve got name information stored in your database, it’s also really simple – in Katoo’s email creator simply click where you want to insert the person’s name and select ‘First Name’ from the personalisation options at the bottom of the screen, it’s just as simple for text messages.

Be careful however to set your line up so that if you don’t have their names then the message still reads ok e.g. you might want to put ‘Hi <first_name>’ but if you don’t have their first name make sure you put an alternative word, ‘there’ for an example.