I received an email from Ian Lurie via Facebook* that had a link to some pretty great and simple advice on how to avoid getting your email stuck to the SPAM box tar-baby. From my experience, and point three in Ian’s blog post, one way to avoid this trap is by keeping it simple: plaintext emails, often labeled as “send as plain text.”
“Use a plain text e-mail, or at least minimize images. An e-mail that’s all or mostly images will likely get flagged as spam. I can’t point to any hard evidence of this, but years of experience has shown me that text e-mails perform better, as far as deliverability.” Via Conversation Marketing
When I send targeted emails out on behalf of clients I make sure kill all photos, images, and HTML from the outgoing email before hitting the send button. Even though these online outreach campaigns are targeted, personalized, and informational, they often get stuck in the same hyper-vigilant SPAM boxes as emails from friends and family.
New mail clients make you click buttons to show images and photos and even check to see if a message is legit. Even if an email doesn’t get stuck in a SPAM box, anything to hold a blogger back from reading our pitch in his INBOX — needing to click on a “Load Images” button or anything, really — can result in an unseen offer or message.
*Lots of bloggers and PR folks have told me that since we’re already friends on Facebook, I should email them on Facebook because that’s where they do their real business and correspondence. Interesting. So, in this case, Ian did a great thing since I not only followed the link he sent me via Facebook email but also wrote this big-ass email about it as well. Bravo Mr. Lurie.
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