Dealing with Spam

has a great summary on the state of spam emails. The attached chart demonstrates that the enormous volume of spam and its continuing growth represents a real challenge for email marketing. Spammers are happy with a 0.000008% response rate because it still generates millions in revenue for their products (who IS buying this stuff?)

Developing email campaigns that

1. get through corporate firewalls
2. get past personal spam filters
3. get read

are not easy.

Here are a couple of  tips that really help:

1. Use a well-scrubbed email list that has been created by people who opt-in
2. Send your emails through a recognized third-party mailer. They are recognized by internet service providers (ISPs) and generally whitelisted
3. Consider adding email authentication keys to your DNS records (to help convince ISPs the ‘sent from’ address is real and not a spoof email address)
4. Create a great-looking email with well-written and relevant content
5. Test the email for spammability
   1. For example, do not embed javascript or Flash in an email (easy to do by cutting and pasting, by the way)
   2. Avoid spammer lingo: lots of exclamation points, all CAPS letters, the word Viagra, etc.
   3. Keep the ratio of image area to text low. Spammers were successfully getting past spam filters by sending images with all of their text. Now if there is one big image in an email and very few words, a spam filter may block it