How to Avoid Having Your Email Blasts End Up in a Spam or Junk Folder

Like most businesses, we have increased the amount of email campaigns we send to clients and prospective clients. We have learned a lot of lessons over the years about how to increase readership and clickthrough rates. 

One of the most important lessons we learned, however, is how to ensure we create email that won't be seen as spam by Outlook mail filters. Let's face it - getting through the door is more than half the battle.  

Here are a few best practices on the subject:

• Use an email service (such as ExactTarget) that does the up-front work of scrubbing your email address list to ensure you won't be sending to unsubscribed contacts. Law firm marketers may want to check out eLaw Marketing, an ExactTarget reseller, run by Josh Fruchter, an attorney with decades of email marketing experience.
• Do a reputation audit on a regular basis to see how your emails are viewed by the monitoring services. We do this a few times a year. This is done by our email service provider, but you can try Barracuda Networks for a regulatory compliance audit, or SenderBase for a reputation lookup.
• Try an email quality check service such as Litmus - they have testing services to enable you to see, ahead of sending, how well your email will fare against various spam filters.
• Register your domain with the Network Abuse Clearinghouse. 
• Watch your wording - there is a list of words that Microsoft Outlook considers particularly spammy, especially when used in your Subject line

Please feel free to share additional suggestions in the comments field, below. 

Cyndy