In today’s world of never-ending spam, it’s becoming more common for your emails to end up in the junk mail folder than the inbox. You need to know the pitfalls to avoid in order to effectively communicate with your clients and prospects through e-mail. You can help your e-mail deliverability by improving in 3 main problem areas:

1. Sender information
2. Subject line
3. Email body

Sender information

Make sure your email address is listed as something obvious to the person you’re sending it to. This sounds like common sense, but you’d be amazed at how many emails can get marked as “Spam” for this one simple problem. When setting up your email accounts, be sure that your “from” name doesn’t have too many random letters or numbers; this is sure to get picked up by the spam filters and will probably be overlooked by your intended recipient. It’s best to use your company name, or just your full name.

Subject line

Most emails will get picked up by spam filters based on the subject line. You must make it a conscious effort, every time you write an email, to make sure that your subject line does not sound like some form of advertisement or spam promotion. Some commonly used “hot” words are:

• Debt
• Bigger
• Degree
• Rates
• Mortgage
• Insurance
• Lower
• Home
• Boss
• Hot
• Action
• Discount
• %
• Satisfy
• Teens

For example, you want to send an email to your clients offering a reward program in which your loyal customers are offered a discount. Even though your email of “10% discount for loyal customers” is harmless and sounds innocent enough, the spam filters are sure to pick this up before your clients ever read it. So avoid “hot” keywords and you’ll already be ahead of the curve in getting your messages read.

Email body

Spam filters also search the body of your email message for keywords. The same rules apply for the actual message as it does the subject line. Although you may have more leeway in the written part of your email, make sure you don’t overdo it with those “hot” keywords or string too many of them together. Again, as with your sender information, large groups of seemingly random numbers and letters can also cause problems with deliverability. Make sure that you’re grammatically correct, as filters will often pick up misspellings, grammar/syntax errors, and large amounts of capitalization. If you’re sending out an email that has links or html codes and images, be sure to test these extensively before blasting to your clients; your background coding needs to be properly formatted in order for it to be seen as legitimate email.

Learning to double-check your emails will take some getting used to, but it’s well worth the increased likelihood of getting your message read. That extra time you spend may very well lead to increased returns and responses in the long run.