It’s all fun and games with email… until someone gets hurt
A few days ago I sent a daily email… like I’ve done many times before.
But this one ended up in the spam folder… in both my Gmail and ProtonMail accounts.
WOOP!… WOOP!… WOOP!
ALL PERSONNEL TO BATTLE STATIONS!
WOOP!… WOOP!… WOOP!
What to do?!?
This has never happened before.
Well… first thing…
Switch off the alarm in your head, Chris!
This stuff happens… even to the best of ’em… So it was bound to happen to you too!
flicks the switch back to “normal”
..
Right. This isn’t the end of the world.
Was probably just a one-off.
Guess I’ll live to write another email tomorrow?
Emails sometime end up in spam. And there’s a lot of reasons for that.
Some are in my control. Others are not.
I’m pointing this out because it’s all-too-easy to think you’re writing an innocuous email…
Meanwhile the spam filters are sharpening their claws and fangs… ready to dine out.
Google is the gatekeeper for many emails. And if it says it’s spam… well… it’s spam.
So it’s worth being aware of what can cause problems.
Because many of us will need to send emails to a list. For our own businesses… or on behalf of clients.
So… I pulled apart my email content. That’s one thing I can control when it comes to avoiding spam.
I used an online spam-word checker. And it decided to point out the following words as problems:
4x “more”
1x “now”
2x “email marketing”
1x “get”
Yeah… machines are dumb.
Even though these were spread out among a 300 word email… that’s obviously not spam to a human reader… I guess it reached some trigger point.
And… BAM!
I thought that was all there was to it…
But a little later I “clicked”.
You see… I’d just done another significant change to my emails.
I had updated my email footer. And that counts towards what’s in the body that spam checkers are looking at.
And… yeah… that’s where I did another pile of stuff-ups.
Again… a human reader wouldn’t think this was spam. But there were some more words in there that kept clocking up the “bad words” count.
sigh
It’s all fun and games with email… until someone gets hurt
In this case… it’s my pride.
But it has taught me something. That is: don’t be cavalier with email footer changes.
And when I’m editing my emails… just to mentally check the content for likely spam words. Although, I’m not going to stop using “more”, “now”, and “get” any time soon!
I think I’ll occasionally run things through a spam checker, just to see how I’m doing.
Fortunately, it’s not something I have to do every time. Because — so far — things have been fine.
And I’m steering clear of potential spam red flags like images, many links, and pushy selling.
BerserkerMail — that I send my emails with — just takes some of those things off the table (no images, limited links).
So I can just focus on the content… which makes the biggest impact on email deliverability.
You can find a free trial, with no credit card required, here:
https://milham.me/berserkermail
Have a great week!
Chris “licking his wounds” Milham
Ready to build your email list? Go here…
EmailForTheWin.com
Chris Milham