Marketing Science Blog

Studies show that up to 25 percent of legitimate permission email never gets delivered to the intended recipients due to spam filters (source: Lyris, Q2 Email Advisory Report Card 2007). It’s enough to make a 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 may end up on the 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, 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 to conform better to industry anti-spam criteria ).

• You regularly check the blacklists just in case someone mistakenly reports 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 1. Emails with a 2 score would get through, but only about 50% of the time. Email scores of 3, 4 and 5 were being trapped cold. This was not 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 unmolested 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 appending with 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 NEVER in subject lines.

• Use capital letters sparingly, especially in the first two paragraphs and NEVER 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 considerations, you will greatly improve your email delivery rates.

Free Spam Filter Content Checker

About the Author:

Bob Thomson is CEO of Marketing Science, Inc. a consulting company that specializes in helping small and medium businesses acquire new clients using proven marketing, copywriting and design concepts. He is also a webmaster, web developer and sales professional with over 20 years of business experience.

Ok, so everybody and their brother is handing out marketing advice for 2008. I would like to provide my own list of things to recommend based on my own experiences as well as some of the things I’ve learned myself recently from my own research and from Alex Mandossian’s training.

#1 Marketing Strategy for 2008: Start a Blog and Post Regularly

A blog (web log) is a great way to add interesting and valuable content to your website without the usual formalities and pressures of writing, refining and publishing articles.

It’s just a lot easier to write when you’re being informal. You don’t have to creatively spit out paragraph after paragraph or obsess over grammar and style. After all, it’s YOUR blog. You write as little or as much as you want.

The marketing benefit of blogging is enormous. Search engines look favorably on blogs (over websites) because the content is usually updated regularly.

Some blogging tips… Try to update your blog at least every 2-3 days. Even better if you can update daily. The search engines will give preference to blogs that update frequently.

For great free blogging software, just click the WordPress link at the bottom of this page. Have your webmaster install it, configure it and you can start blogging right away!

#2 Marketing Strategy for 2008: SEO Search Engine Optimization

I am amazed at the large number of business websites which have poor (or no) search engine optimization. I believe part of this problem comes from the fact that many businesses have relied heavily on pay per click advertising as a quick fix to their search engine traffic woes.

As a result SEO gets passed over or a belief develops within the company that SEO is only for big companies with deep pockets. Nothing could be further from the truth. For a modest investment of say $75 -100 per page most small or medium businesses can enjoy a nice return on investment.

For example, I recently built a new website for one of my home care clients. I optimized it for mostly local search traffic using long tail keywords and many keywords which don’t even appear in the keyword inventories of search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo.

This may seem somewhat contrarian to the normal keyword research a company or SEO consultant might recommend i.e. “only select and use keywords you find from the keyword tools of search engines”.

But my clients are benefiting from good traffic to their local businesses with these “invisible” keywords. In order to find these keywords you have to work closely with your clients and their prospects to figure out what’s most important to them and what’s “top of mind” when they do a search. Often times they use phrases which aren’t popular enough to be listed by the keyword tools. They add a town name or a city to a phrase for example. When taken collectively, all these invisible keywords can bring substantial traffic to a website.

If you do anything this year to improve your website traffic, have your site optimized and try to update your content regularly.

#3 Marketing Strategy for 2008: Video Content on Blogs and Websites

As most people have already figured out, video is “white hot” on the Internet right now. And there’s no end in sight. What’s especially great about this is the fact that search engines are currently giving priority to sites which contain video. Even more priority if you update with new video regularly.

In fact I believe this is NOT a fad, but web videos are here to stay. A lot like reality TV, video captures and commands people’s imagination and attention. It’s addictive. We are all voyeurs to some degree and video plays on this natural human characteristic.

Admittedly, I’ve been behind the web video curve, but no more. I went out and purchased a Flip Video camera that will create high resolution “how to” videos that I can place in my blogs and websites.

So my recommendation to anyone reading this post, is to just get started with video. You don’t need an expensive video camera, you can pick up a decent DVR (Digital Video Recorder) for as little as $100. Once you’ve done that, start creating some video tutorials or “how to” videos for your area of expertise.

Not only will these videos showcase your talents, they can create a “viral video effect” if you are providing something of real value and give people the opportunity to share the videos with friends at social bookmarking (like Digg, Stumble Upon) and networking sites (like FaceBook and MySpace) or by using a good TAF (Tell a Friend) script. If done correctly, the results could be a flood of new traffic coming to your site on a regular basis.

Part II in tomorrow’s post.

-Bob

I am feeling very guilty since I have not been posting lately in the marketing blog since I started my taxes. But the good news is that my taxes are done.

I’ve been very productive with some much needed website changes too. I’ll write up a separate post to outline the major (and not so major) changes I am implementing for 2008 and the impact it should have moving forward.

I’m very excited about the rest of the year ahead as January and February have been highly productive overall, with both work and continuing education.

-Bob

It’s here…Alex Mandossian’s favorite training module is tonight!!

That module is “Selling Strategies: How to Motivate Your Listeners to Buy on Command”.

I am really looking forward to this, I’m sure Alex will be in rare form tonight!

I am one of the crazy North easterners that stays up until 3 am listening to the FAQ sessions following the training. I have to admit though, the last 2 modules I was intermittently falling asleep so I can’t remember the last 3 hours of content.

That’s what the replays are for.

Will post again soon…

Bob

Haven’t been able to blog lately, I’m very busy preparing my books and taxes for my accountant.

Can’t wait until it’s over!!