Email Marketing: 5 Hot Words to Avoid
by Nadia Jones | 4 Comments | Mailing Lists
While most internet marketers have turned to social media to sell their products and services, developing a strong email campaign is still an essential component to the entire internet marketing field. In fact, some experts forecast that consumers will contribute about $67.8 billion into the U.S. market simply from making purchases through email marketing this year.
While emails are still a strong driven force behind sales, the problem is making sure that your email is actually read and not automatically placed in the recipient's spam folder, which most popular email servers like Gmail and Yahoo with sensitive spam filters, so often do. Spam filters are great for separating illegitimate and fraudulent emails that may be scams and harm consumers, but not so much for you"”an honest, ethic-orientated internet marketer who's just trying to make a sale.
An easy way to make sure that your email doesn't get lost in the abyss of Spam World however is to be really cautious about what your email subject headline says"”this is how spam filters operate. They pick up certain words that are reported by an array of different sources"”consumers, internet service providers, and email programmers for example"”and collectively comprise a list of words that are linked to spam messages. While the list changes all the time since spammers get smart, there are some well-known key words that you should avoid from placing in the subject headline if you want your email to get the attention it deserves. That said, below are our top 5, some of which may or may not apply to you.
- Dear Friend: It's generic and may sound safe enough, but if you have your client's name on the list serve, use it and personalize their email. An email with a "dear friend" subject headline will get sent straight to the spam folder.
- Congratulations: Some marketers are tempted to use this in order to tell consumers, "Congrats! You get free shipping and handling or Congrats! You got a discount on your next purchase. But refrain from putting congratulations in the subject headline. You'll be thankful you did.
- Affordable: Even if what you are selling is affordable, it's not a good idea to say so from the get go. Scammers usually use words like these to lure consumers to open up their emails and that's why the word affordable is on the no-no list.
- Free: Because scammers like to dupe consumers with "free" products, using this word in your subject line will come with a heavy fee"”it'll get sent to the spam folder.
- Not Spam: You may think that you're clever by announcing that the email is NOT in fact spam in the hopes of encouraging your costumers to read on, but unfortunately one too many scammers have tried this trick before.
What words would you add on the list?
This is an interesting way to approach the issue of online and email marketing. You correctly point out that the most important thing in your email marketing is to actually get the message through to the potential customer.
What complicates this p...Author Bio:
This is a guest post by Nadia Jones who blogs at accredited online colleges about education, college, student, teacher, money saving, movie related topics. You can reach her at nadia.jones5 @ gmail.com.
January 12th, 2012 at 8:40 am
Everybody welcome our first guest poster! I'm still "on sabbatical" (ie. swamped with a few other projects), but it's good to get something new on the blog. I hope you liked it.
January 12th, 2012 at 9:46 am
Any email with subject line that includes "Go go go" or likewise earns an unsubscribe from me.
July 14th, 2012 at 10:57 pm
In addition to the words to avoid listed in this article, I have learned that a crucial component to getting your emails opened is creating a subject line that sounds natural and looks unlike anything else the end user is generally seeing on a regular basis.
This gets tougher and tougher as the time goes by and users get more savvy about being solicited online. In this regard, you must either say something clever or provide real value in the subject line in order to get them to open what you created.
July 21st, 2012 at 4:16 pm
This is an interesting way to approach the issue of online and email marketing. You correctly point out that the most important thing in your email marketing is to actually get the message through to the potential customer.
What complicates this problem is the existence of email spam filters. These spam filters basically scour through an email and look for certain words that they have determined to be more indicative of spam or spammer activity. Therefore, it makes total sense to avoid these words and phrases.
You gives a nice list of the top 5 hot words to avoid if you want to have a better chance of getting your email through the filters. Of course there are a lot more than 5, but this is a great place to start. After reading this article, I realize that it would help every email marketer to really study this subject in more detail and learn ALL of the words and phrases to avoid, not just the top 5 or even 10!