What is spam you ask? Isn't that a canned cooking product? Well, it is, but it is also a huge part of modern day emailing, and even more so in terms of marketing.
Spam is a message which is sent out electronically to a massive
audience, in which the recipient would not usually want to receive.
It consists of advertising, for products and services. Spam can also
come in get-rich-quick schemes or pretend legal services. It is very inexpensive
to send out to a mass audience, it costs the sender very little, and is paid
mostly by the recipient or the carriers.
The most popular type of spam used today is done by email. The main
use of spam is commercial content and advertising. Spam has also been called unsolicited
bulk email (UBE), unsolicited commercial Email (UCE) or junk mail. Spam has a
pretty high stake in all everyday emails, up to 80-85%.
Now that we know what spam is, how do we avoid it? How do we get our
message through to our customers? Email providers, such as Gmail, Hotmail,
Yahoo, and even our Mocomotion have built in spam filters. These filters target
key words and phrases. They also target certain ways an email is typed. For example, if you type "SAVE NOW ON WINDOW INSTALLATION" In all caps and green writing, these are warning signs for the filters and they may block your email. A blocked email means that your message will go to the junk/spam folder. That is the last place you want your message to go, because let's be honest, how often do you go sifting through your junk emails?
As well as using a spam filter, Gmail uses something rather neat. They have a community based spam filter. This means, if an email I received should be spam, but got through to my inbox. I am able to mark it as spam. This will go through the network, and it will remove it from others peoples inbox as well.
Gmail on Spam
Take a look at this video; it was created by the Gmail team. Although lacking in professionalism, the video is very informative and shows the way Gmail is fighting spam.
Before you send out your email, you'll want to look it over to
make sure you have as little properties of spam as possible. You can go to this
website here, http://www.americaint.com/spam-filter-messagetest/spam-checker.html.
This website will check your email and make sure it will pass through spam
filters. It will check your email and give it a score of anything from 0.1 to
anything over 13.1 (which is major spam content). Now that we know how to build our marketing emails free of spam and how to check them to make sure they will get through to our target. We are ready to start emailing! Have fun!
Thank you for reading my blog!
Austin Lerke
