Email Deliverability - Your Good SpamAssassin Scores May Not Be Enough

Studies show that up to 25 percent of legitimate permission email never gets delivered to the intended recipients because of spam filters (source: Lyris, Q2 Email Advisory Report Card 2007). It's enough to make a permission marketer's blood boil.

Internet Service Providers in an effort to reduce spam and demonstrate their customer responsiveness have provided their subscribers with a 'spam button' in their hosted email accounts. One simple click and your email address and content have been flagged as unwanted spam. A few dozen clicks by unknowing subscribers and you will probably end up on several email blacklists.

As more and more people report real spam to their ISP's, legitimate permission email marketers continue to get caught in the net. In fact, getting your legitimate marketing email delivered has never been tougher. In this article I will provide some real world examples of battles I've had with the ISP filters and how I solved these frustrating email deliverability problems.

The Problem

As an upstanding and ethical email marketer you have done your part to get your mail delivered. Or so you think...

• You eliminated the filter words that ISP's use to trap spam cold.

• You added special characters like periods, asterisks and tildes to important (but suspect) words so they look like *free*, off.er, big sa~le, etc.

• You personalized the email by using your subscribers' names in the body of your mail and in your subject.

• You tested your mail against the SpamAssassin™ database content checker and have received good scores of 2 and 3 (If your score is greater than 5, SA recommends that you revise your message substantially to conform better to industry anti-spam criteria).

• You check the blacklists on occasion just in case people mistakenly report your mail as spam.

• Next, you confidently broadcast your message to your opt in list. Minutes (or sometimes hours) later you receive a deliverability report on your broadcast from your smart autoresponder or email broadcast software.

• To your shock and dismay, your mail has not been delivered to most if any of your recipients. Your heart is now in your throat and you feel violated in some way.

Unfortunately, the scenario described above is happening with chilling regularity. It has happened to me personally four times. Each time I spent several hours trying to figure out why my SA-approved email content was stopped dead in its tracks by the ISP's. It was terribly frustrating.

The Solution

I set out to fix this problem once and for all. I constructed two dozen different test emails using all sorts of combinations and variations of suspect words with negative scoring weights and sent them to a dummy list. Eventually, after a lot of frustration and several weeks of trial and error I discovered a pattern. I could no longer trust my 'good' spam scores as good enough to get my email delivered. It seems the sophisticated ISP filters are now scrutinizing and trapping innocent, good-scoring email.

Now here's the kicker... to get my opt in emails through the ISP filter with near 100% certainty, I had to have SpamAssassin™ content scores of 0 or very close (like 0.2, 0.3). Emails with a 1 - 2 score would get through, but only about 50% of the time. Email scores of 3, 4 and 5 were being trapped cold. This didn't seem to be the case a year or even six months ago. At that time, I was sending messages with scores of 3 and 4 which passed through the ISP filters to the intended recipients.

Simple Tips For Getting Your Opt In Email Delivered

• Use a filter words list as a reference when creating your email content. Just search on the phrase "email filter words" or "spam filter words" and you will find pages containing these words. Copy and paste them into a personal document for future use.

• Find and use synonyms as substitutes for as many filter words as possible. For those words you cannot find suitable synonyms for, modify them by adding extra characters like asterisks (*), tildes (~) and periods (.). For example: "Sign up for our *free* teleseminar..."

• Some common filter words and phrases to either avoid or modify are: cash, money, offer, specials, order now, free, act now, buy, financing, debt, promotion, guaranteed, MLM, no cost, online marketing, subscriber, amazing, % off... among many others.

• Use quotation marks, exclamation points and dollar signs sparingly and not in subject lines.

• Use capital letters sparingly, especially in the first two paragraphs and not in subject Lines.

• Use content variables (such as 'name') to customize your mail and subject line.

• Keep testing your content with a content checker through trial and error to achieve a spam score of 0.

By taking the time to make the above adjustments, you will greatly improve your email delivery rates.

Free Spam Filter Content Checker: http://www.marketing-register.com/top_tools/Free_Spam_Checker/index.shtml