How To Avoid Spam Filters

Updated: May 25, 2022

Trying to learn how to avoid spam filters? This guide will walk you through the steps to take to improve your email deliverability and marketing effectiveness.

The first step, of course, is simply to not send spam.

What is spam?

The simplest definition for spam is unsolicited bulk email. “Unsolicited” simply means that the recipient did not ask for the email. “Bulk” means the message is being sent to a lot of people at once. TrafficWave follows a strict no-spam policy and our system is set up to be used only for permission based email marketing.

When you have someone’s permission to send them email, there are still more sides to the issue of how to avoid spam filters.

How Do Spam Filters Work?

This is where we have to tell you: There is good news and bad news. The bad news is that the details of how spam filters actually work is a closely guarded secret. The spam filters don’t want spammers knowing how to beat them so they don’t share that information. The good news is we do have some information about how they work so legitimate email marketers can get their emails into the inbox. In general, spam filters look at a few things when deciding what to do with emails:

The Technical Stuff TrafficWave takes detailed steps to make sure that all the technical ducks are in a row. We make sure our servers are compliant with server authentication requirements. We constantly monitor our overall sending reputation and make adjustments when necessary.

We also make sure that our users are taking the necessary steps from their side to make it easier to deliver their valuable message to their subscribers. When industry changes happen (and they do), we quickly make adjustments and update our users on how they can stay compliant, know how to avoid spam filters, and get their messages delivered.

Content Matters Simple things like your subject line and the content of your message go a long way toward impacting your overall deliverability. With a little bit of planning and forethought, you can avoid the most common mistakes.

Keep it simple. Using interactive codes like javascript, rss feeds, form code, etc… can quickly cause your message to be flagged as spam. Keep your message clean and save the fancy stuff for your web site once the reader clicks your link.

Messy formatting can cause issues, too. We advise using the TrafficWave Letter Editor to keep the formatting clean. Copying and pasting from Word, for example, can add a lot of extra and pointless code which can negatively impact your deliverability.

Avoid common formatting tricks:

WRITING IN ALL CAPS
using excessive punctuation!!!??? in your subject line
d0ing w3ird th1ngs with letters and numbers
using too many different font colors
using large font sizes (anything greater than 10pt or 12pt)

Not only can these sorts of things trigger spam filters, they will also most likely annoy your readers causing them to mark your message as spam.

Be careful about your image to text ratio. An email that contains a large image and little to no text can easily be flagged as spam. The same is true of a message that has a lot of images compared to the overall text. There is no “rule” on what the ratio should be, but a little bit of common sense applies here. We recommend adding alt tags in your images, as well.

Even when you take these steps, emails can be marked as spam. Why?

Irrelevance If your email message isn’t in line with the reason your subscribers joined your list, they are going to ignore, leave, or mark your message as spam.

Timing When someone joins your list, follow up right away. Keep a fairly consistent followup and broadcast schedule to keep your brand in front of their minds. If too much time goes by, they can forget they signed up and the message you finally send will seem like spam to them.

The other side of that coin is to not send messages too often. Finding that balance can be a good blend of art and science as you track your open and click through rates.

It just happens Many email service providers make it very easy for users to flag a message as spam. It happens to us all. Your best defense is to follow the advice given above.

Check this article to see more: Why Does My Message Go To The Spam Folder?

Want to test your emails in various email services? Click Here To Learn How.