Overview
You can email your contacts without being marked as spam. Recipients mark emails as spam for a variety of reasons: they don’t know/trust the sender, the content doesn’t apply to them, they don’t want emails from the sender. Here are some tips to avoid your email content looking like a spam email.
Content Tips
- Check and double check.
- Your email recipients quickly lose respect for a sender if they don’t take the time to check that spelling and grammar are correct. Represent yourself in the best light, so don’t just rely on spellcheck. Use your coworkers to double and triple check that everything is good to go.
- Limit your use of exclamation marks.
- One exclamation mark can go a long way. Overdoing exclamation marks can be a turnoff for your recipients. If you want to convey excitement, express it with word choice or an image. Also, don't put exclamation marks in your subject line, it will look like spam.
- DON’T GET EXCITED WITH ALL CAPS.
- Just like the exclamation mark, all caps are often used to show excitement. In reality, it looks like you are yelling at your recipients. You can put a word here and there in all caps or boldface for emphasis, but including it too often could trip the spam triggers and send your email straight to junk. Same as the exclamation mark, do not include all-caps in your subject line.
- Color is important.
- Don’t use hard-to-read colors like red or anything neon. It can appear unprofessional and is also unappealing to the eye. You may sparingly use splashly bright colors for emphasis, but do not use them as the main color. Additionally, don’t include invisible text to create space or design (white text on a white background). It could be interpreted as you hiding something and could be automatically identified as spam.
- Stay away from risky words and salesy lingo.
- Be careful of the words you include in your subject line. Don’t include phrases you like “pre-approved”, “satisfaction guaranteed”, or “big deal, low price”; in addition, stay away from words like buy, bonus, free, prize, or win as well. These are high-risk words that are often found in spam. Here is a full list from HubSpot of risky, spam-triggering words you should do best to avoid in your subject lines and email content.
- Don’t fatten with keywords.
- Keywords are great, but too many will look like a buzzword dump. Include a couple here and there, just make sure your email has a natural conversational tone and reads like it’s been written by a human.
- Using links.
- Be careful with how you link and what you link. Make sure anything you link to is not only real but reputable. Also, don't link with the phrases “click here” or “check this out” because they could be seen as spam.
- Keep your text-to-image ratio in check.
- Images are a great way to enhance an email, but they’re also a way for spam filters to dump your email in the junk. SendGrid suggests that for every image you include, have at least two lines of text. This will help show the legitimacy of your email.