Why has my email gone into the Junk Folder?

This is is the second of a three-part series written by our email marketing solution partners, MailingManager, in an attempt to cover every aspect of spam and ensure you are making the most out of your email marketing efforts.

If you haven’t read the first part of this series just _click here_ to be redirected to part one.

Why has my email gone into the Junk Folder?

This is slightly more predictable (than emails not arriving) as there is a general set of rules to abide by. But once again, you can’t account for companies personal spam rules.

Spam Keywords
Certain words will trigger a spam filter to mark it as potentially unsolicited email. These words actually get assigned different scores based on the likelihood of the email being spammy and these scores add up throughout your email. If you end up clocking up a high score throughout your email, it will end up junked.
To avoid this, don’t use too many spammy words! Mailingmanager offers in its system a pre-mail spam keyword check that will run through your mail and highlight the spam keywords for you. Just get that score low and you stand a much higher chance of inbox delivery.

Image to Text Ratio
Some emails won’t be delivered due to the massive amount of images in them. This is because when Spam filters tightened a while ago on spam keywords, spammers chose to insert all the content that was getting blocked into images to avoid the content filters.
Avoid using images too much. You can usually push your branding without having images everywhere. We always advise you do this anyway as many clients now have images blocked as standard and by having your message as text, you can still guarantee you get your message across despite image blocking.

Reputation
The reputation of your sending server can play a massive part in the delivery of your email; in particular, in the B2C area of email marketing. Many of the major online email clients (hotmail, yahoo etc) will check the originating source of the email and then decide where to deliver it. A high scoring reputation will give the email a very high chance of delivery and vice versa.

Of course one of the major advantages of using an ESP such as mailingmanager is that you don’t have to worry about any of this; we do it all for you.

Poor Coding
You just wouldn’t believe the amount of times I go through this with customers – and I pin all the blame on Microsoft for this. Poor coding can cause deliverability problems as the filters reject bad coding (the sign of a spammer).

Why is it the sign of a spammer? Because most true spammers do not care for html and instead go for creating their emails in programs such as Microsoft Word, which inserts all this non-valid html rubbish into their coding when creating an html page in there.

A lot of newbies to email marketing will tend to use Word to create the content of their campaign and then paste it over to their email from there. The problem with that is it also transfers over some of this rubbish code with it so that it keeps the same fonts and sizes, which in turn hurts the deliverability chances of that email.

Best thing to do in this situation (as you’ve guessed) is to not use Word to create your content. Programs such as notepad will work perfectly in creating content offline and then paste into your email and do the fonts within the campaign itself.

Get Your Email Strategy Started with MailingManager and LCN.com
All LCN.com customers can get an email marketing campaign off the ground with a full Mailing Manager account topped up with 500 free email credits by logging into the LCN.com control panel and selecting ‘bonus features’

For more information about the Mailing Manager email marketing solution please visit: www.mailingmanager.co.uk

Next Monday we will be publishing the final part of this series.