Amy's posts

Email is used by most of us as a quick, cheap way of telling your audiences and supporters all your news.

However, when you’ve slaved away creating your fabulously interesting and beautiful email newsletter, the last thing you want to find is that your mail has been caught by spam filters and never reached some of your subscribers.

The good news is, as spam software works by looking out for certain words, phrases and formatting, there are things you can do to limit the chances of this happening.

Five top tips to avoid the spam filters:

1. Don’t write whole sentences in capital letters. Spam often contains passages of text in uppercase which get caught by filters, e.g. “DON’T MISS THIS FABULOUS OFFER”, so keep the capitals to a minimum.

2. Try not to use the phrase “only £”, especially near words like “special offer” or “free offer”. If you have a special offer for your readers, try experimenting with other ways of phrasing this instead.

3. When wanting to illustrate how much your audiences can save by booking a certain package, deal or offer, limit the amount to which you use the “£” sign near the word “save”. “Save £10” probably won’t cause you many problems, but “save £££!” is a ticket straight to the spam folder.

4. Some spam filters catch emails that use the phrase “Dear Friend”, “Dear Jenny”, “Dear Jon”… or any other capitalised name. To avoid this one, try experimenting with other greetings, for example “Hi” or “Hello”.

5. The phrases “click here” or “click below” are also caught by some spam software. Try avoiding the word “click” – experiment with other phrases that do the same job, like “visit here”, “visit this page” and “find out more”.

As a general rule, if you match a couple of these there’s no need to worry. Using just “Dear Friend” probably won’t get your email classed as spam; it’s the cumulative effect of using a few of these phrases that will cause problems.