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Getting your promotional emails into an opt-in subscribers inbox, and past the all-mighty Spam Filter,
is one of the hardest, and increasingly difficult tasks for the online marketer.
Those Spam filters affect at much as 30% of your click-through rates.. That’s a lot.

Subscriber Addresses
Try asking for “real” or “primary” email address when requesting website visitors to opt-in for a product.
Many prospects will input their actual ISP mail, which means you’ll have a valid verified address, and not
some throw away account thats been opened for free, and would typically have a shorter lifetime than ISP
address.

Permissions
Confirming that the people who ask for your information have actually requested to be on your list is
the number one step in the battle for deliverability.
You should be using what is called a “confirmed opt-in” or “verified opt-in” to send a unique link
to the attempted subscriber when they request information. Before adding the person to your list
they must click that unique link verifying that they are indeed the same person that owns the email
address and requested to subscribe.

Formatting
HTML formatted messages are growing more and more popular, since they allow text formatting,
multiple columns, images, and brand recognition, and are widely supported by most email clients.
Most spam is also HTML formatted. That means that differentiating between requested email and
spam HTML messages is getting difficult for the filter engines.
A study by Aweber a few years back shows that HTML messages are flagged undeliverable twice as many
times as plain text messages. This is why it is important to send a plain text alternative message along with
your HTML.

List Maintenance
Remove undeliverable addresses!
Those addresses bounce when sending email to them. An address that bounces with a permanent error 2-3
times in a 30 day period should be removed from the list. ISP’s track what percentage of your newsletters
bounce and will block them if you attempt to continually deliver messages to closed subscriber mailboxes.

Mail Content
Many ISP’s filter based on the content that appears within the message text.

Website URL:
If you use advertisers in your newsletter – Research before allowing them to place ads in your newsletter.
If they have used their website URL to send spam, just having their URL appear in your newsletter
might get the entire message to be sent straight to the Spam box.

Words/phrases:
Choose your words carefully when writing messages.
Avoid topics often found in spam such as medication, mortgages, making money, and pornography.
However – And this is Important – If you do need to use words that might be filtered, don’t attempt
to distort words with extra characters or odd spelling, you’ll just make your messages appear more
like spam.

Images:
Try not to create image-only messages. Use images sparingly, if at all.
Commonly used open rate tracking technology uses images to calculate opens, so you may
choose to disable open rate tracking to avoid being filtered based on image content.

Attachments:
Attachments are a very sensitive issue in our virus filled world.
Often linking to files via a website URL will be a much better solution.
This will reduce recipient fear of attachments, and reduce the overall message size.

These are just highlights of what you should watch for when writing a sales copy to your downline.
We hope you’ve found this article useful, and that you will use our Tips.

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