Copywriting 911

Let’s face it: some up-to-date technique innovations are too smart, so smart, in fact, that they turn out to give more trouble than benefit. Supposing you want to sell a product and inform your potential customers about the discounts using email. A quite simple plan, nevertheless, your message may stay undelivered. The point is that various email protection systems, such as SpamAssassin or Aristotle Spam Defense Network, do their best to filter all the unnecessary data, and rather often they overdo. According to the report placed in Time Magazine, 40 to 70 percent of all incoming emails are simply wiped out before they could reach their destination. Moreover, up to 27% of legitimate emails are spam-filtered without getting into the recipient’s inbox and, the worst of all, it remains unknown to the sender!

So unfortunately, many of today’s spam filters aren’t perfect and the risk that your email may never be read is still high.

However, there exist some useful tips which help to survive the most insidious filters.

First let’s see what we are dealing with. Spam filters review all incoming emails, seeking certain patterns which can be classified as spam. The system scrutinizes separate words, as well as word combinations, sentences and even colors. Depending on the email’s content, the spam filter adds to or takes away points from its scoring system. If the spam score rates about 20% of the total (usually, the upper limit equals to 5 points), the file will get through easily; if it equals to 21-50%, the filter marks it as possible spam, and if the score happens to be 51% or more, your message is automatically killed.

To prevent such a dismal end, your should make up your email very properly. For example, the subject line content is very important, as it is checked the most thoroughly. Your subject line should contain the date which helps to take off some 0.5 points, and if it also has a newsletter header, a whole dozen of points will be taken off, too.

Next, keep the size of your email within 20K to 40K range. If your message is under 20K, the protection system can consider it as spam and will add up to 0.7 points.

Some formatting, like caps (particularly in the subject line), colors and hyperlinks shouldn’t be overused. No good will come of excessive punctuation either.

Besides that, experts advise to avoid cliches like Dear… and to replace remove with unsubscribe. Other words and phrases which are “unpopular” among spam filters, are money making, financial freedom and click below (use go here instead).

In addition, to go successfully through any kinds of protection systems, the message has to be personalized with the customer’s name.

Finally, the best way to save your email from the filters is to be included in the address book of your recipients: in this case you don’t have to pass through the spam checker at all.

To be continued…