Spam is a much-misunderstood term, all too often used to delete messages quickly when faced with an overflowing inbox, which makes the life of the B2B marketer all the more difficult.
Of the 32 billion emails that are sent every day, 65 per cent are labelled spam and even 20 per cent of legitimate emails are trapped by spam filters. This means that few messages are actually getting through the countless authentication and reputation programmes, content filters and protection legislation that are put in place to rid cyberspace of unsolicited messages.
Marketers are therefore faced with a difficult task when it comes to realising a return on investment in this channel. However, there are certain measures that can be taken to differentiate a legitimate marketing message from Spam, increasing your chances of exposure to the recipient.
Here are some top tips to slip your company in under the spam radar and get your genuine marketing messages seen.
1. Avoid the ‘black hole’ effect
The most common means of blocking spam is using a blacklist, which is a list of domain names and IP (Internet protocol) addresses that are considered to have sent spam at some point, however these lists aren’t always accurate and some legitimate, opt-in messages are often caught. Fortunately, for every blacklist there is also a whitelist listing preferred sources of trusted messages. If you can get listed on one of these you will be able to send bulk messages to that Internet service provider and receive preferential treatment in the delivery of your message.
2. Colour co-ordination
If your message manages to make it onto a whitelist there is still no guarantee that it will be delivered to the recipient. Some spam filters will redirect certain messages to separate bulk-mail folders just because of the way they look. To make sure your message isn’t relegated to a message box never to be seen again, don’t use coloured backgrounds or lots of images: these are the first things that filters pick up on and are often instantly deleted by recipients with overflowing inboxes.
3. Subject matters
Spam filters also pay attention to the subject line of a message, so always spend some time when devising your headline: it should be a call to action or have a clear value proposition and it should never include the word ‘free’ or numerous exclamation marks. This advice will not only help get you through the spam barriers, but hopefully increase the chances of the recipient reading it, rather than simply hitting the ‘delete’ button.
4. Return to sender
The sender name should always include your name or your company’s name in order to distance yourself from spammers and time wasters selling weight loss pills or Nigerian scam merchants. The same applies to the recipient name – try and make this the address of the person you want to receive it, not an ‘undisclosed recipient’.
5. Opt-in marketing
The best way to avoid being binned as spam and to ensure that your recipient will actually read the message is to use only opt-in data that is cleaned regularly and kept fully up to date. This not only makes your campaign more accurate but also protects your brand – you don’t want people to remember you because they couldn’t opt out of an e-newsletter campaign that they never wanted to receive in the first place.
6. Quality not quantity
In the marketing industry it’s often still believed that to make a campaign cost effective it should go to as many people as possible. But to avoid being mistakenly identified by spam filters as unsolicited messages, send your message to a select few. This is much more likely to pass through the various filters, as opposed to an email going out to hundreds of addresses that will more than likely be stopped straight away.
7. Buying in
If you choose to buy in a target list from someone else, ask lots of questions before you buy. Where did the list come from? How were the addresses culled? How targeted is the list to your expected market? Has the list been used before? Some bought lists may have been used before for sending out unsolicited messages and you don’t want to be tarred with the same brush.
There is no doubt that spam is a big problem in today’s marketing industry and this is set to grow to damaging proportions in the near future. Marketers should therefore be taking action now to clean data, build up accurate databases and have a serious think about their current approach to email as a marketing channel.
