Spam has reached epidemic levels.  It’s estimated 80%-95% of email is spam with 100 billion spam messages currently sent per day.  Poor Bill Gates reportedly receives 4 million spam messages per year or nearly 11,000 per day.

Consequently, an entire sub-industry of anti-spam technology has arisen to combat spam.  The problem this poses for people with legitimate opt-in email mailing lists is all your emails get analyzed with the same rigorous standards as spam.  When you send commercial emails to your database, if you don’t take steps in distinguishing them from spam emails, your emails are likely to get put into spam folders or blocked and never reach your recipients at all.

So here are the best ways for beating anti-spam technology and reaching email inboxes:

1)    Get Added To Recipient Safe Sender Lists: At the start of each email to your list remind your recipients to add you to their safe senders list.  This is a silver bullet solution to always getting into your recipient’s inboxes.  It’s like getting on the VIP guest list to a nightclub or knowing the owner of a busy Yorkville restaurant when you’re trying to make a Saturday night reservation: you get treated like royalty.  When your recipients add you to their safe senders list your emails automatically bypass any anti-spam technology and go right into their inbox every time.  It’s called white listing: a mail server or PC keeps a list of email addresses and domains pre-approved for sending emails to it.

2)    Personalize Your Emails: as much as possible, compose emails to your mailing list as if you were writing a normal email to a friend or business associate.  Start off with a salutation on the first line: eg. “Hi Frank,”.  In personal emails you normally just type and let the lines wrap at the end, so don’t hit return at the end of each line, only at the end of each paragraph.  Conclude your email with a parting word like ‘Regards’ or ‘Sincerely’ or ‘Thanks’.  Also be sure to have an email signature at the end of any emails you send.  Many anti-spam programs recognize all of the above elements as part of a normal person-to-person email and hence will be less likely to judge it as spam.

3)    Avoid Excessive Commercial and Hype-ish Words/Phrases: a tell-tale sign of a spam email is many commercial sounding words and phrases.  If you tell your recipients to ‘Act Now!’ the only “act” will be spam blockers putting your email into junk folders or blocking them altogether.  The popular anti-spam program Lyris Mailshield has over 180 commercial words and phrases it looks for in emails.  It uses a scoring system for judging whether an email is spam or not.  If any instances of those 180 words/phrases are found in your email, points are assigned, depending on the spam-ishness rating of the word/phrase.  If your email scores above a certain point threshold, it goes into the spam folder.  If it scores below that threshold, it goes into the inbox.  Here are some of the red flag words/phrases for Lyris Mailshield, many of which real estate professionals may use in their mailings:

-    Home
-    Mortgage
-    Invest, Investment, Investor, Investing
-    Discount
-    Affordable
-    Financial
-    Insurance
-    No Cost
-    Sales
-    Guarantee
-    Credit
-    Credit Card
-    Top Quality
-    Risk-Free
-    Toll-Free
-    Click Now

4)    Build An Email Reputation With Microsoft:  Microsoft is a perennial leader in the computer world, and they’re no different with email.  They’ve realized anti-spam technology will sometimes put non-commercial emails into spam folders and put spam emails into inboxes.  So they’ve come up with a reputation rating system for email called their Sender ID program.  It really helps ensure your emails get into inboxes, not spam folders.  For more information visit Microsoft’s Sender ID program page.

If you’re wondering what you should (and shouldn’t) email to your database, my RECO approved course The Awesome Power of Email helps you construct effective email campaigns for your target audience.