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	Use New "Best-Practices" to Reduce Your Odds of Being Blocked by Spam Filters

The Use of Spam Filters is Increasing, and Email Delivery and Response is Decreasing.

Over the last several months we have seen a significant drop in email delivery rates along with a slight decrease in response rates — both in direct-permission lead generation campaigns and house list communication campaigns. We attribute this to the increased use of spam filters by individuals and enterprises. So we've taken a proactive approach to stop this erosion by conducting an exhaustive evaluation of various spam filtering technologies. Plus, we've gleaned a wealth of knowledge about how these filters work from a new client that just happens to make enterprise spam filters.

Our Solutions:

	1.	We've developed a new set of "best-practices" that greatly increase the odds of getting your emails delivered.
	2.	We've created a proprietary spam scoring system that rates the likelihood that an email will get past spam filters.

Spam filters evaluate emails using rules that are chosen by the user (or IT department). For each rule, the filter applies a score. If the total score for all rules exceeds a specified number, the email is blocked. So the challenge for marketeers is to learn why messages are blocked, and design emails that increase the odds of delivery. Here are some of our new best-practices:


Subject Lines
	•	Don't use "spam-blocked" words
	•	Minimize the use of capital letters, and don't use words with all caps
	•	Try not to exceed 55 characters + spaces
	•	Don't use exclamation marks, dollar signs or unusual punctuation


Headlines and Content
	•	Don't use excessive capitalization or unusual punctuation
	•	Avoid "spam-blocked words"


Design
	•	Avoid large font sizes
	•	Be careful with the use of color
		•	Format font color tags correctly
		•	Use only "Web safe" colors
	•	Note: Animated gifs are OK as long as file size is controlled


Technology
	•	Be sure HTML tags comprise less than 50% of your email message
	•	Use hyperlinks, where possible, that use domain names (not IP addresses)
	•	Keep message size between 20k and 40k

Additional Tips:

	1.	For newsletters or regular house-list communications, declare that they are a newsletter or regular correspondence by using the word "newsletter" or "news," and/or using months, dates, issue or volume numbers.
	2.	Ask your recipients to put your email address in their address book.
	3.	Test, test, test! Use test samples (5,000 minimum) for lead generation, and set up test accounts at selected ISPs to pre-test your house list communications so you can evaluate delivery metrics.
	4.	Contact us now for procedures you need to put in place to be compliant with the latest spam legislation.

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