Something you need to consider when you build your first list is the dreaded “S” word – Spam. Many think that email marketing is spam and you’ll hear people ask others “is email marketing spam”? I’m here to tell you that whilst some consider it to be – but why it isn’t when you do it right.

Let’s start off by looking at why people tend to think that email marketing is spam.

Take a look in your spam box. Take a look at your inbox. I’m willing to bet that you’ve got some form of penis enlargement advert or make money at home scam in there. And this is the problem. People see this and instinctively go into “email is spam” mode, thinking that most of their email is spam.

But when you build your first list, and hopefully continue down the email marketing route later on, if you follow these tips, then you’ll be fine.

Be careful what you type

Open up those spam emails again and take a look at what their actual content is. 99% of the time you’ll find some words like “Free”, “Money and “Sex”. Email providers like Google and Microsoft work around the hours developing algorithms that scan these messages as they come in to your email account looking for these trigger words. Once they see them, the majority of the time they’ll mark them as spam and put them in your spam box.

The way to overcome this is to be yourself when writing out your messages and autoresponders. Instead of saying something along the lines of

10,000 Free subscribers for your list

You would word it like so:

Let me personally show you how to grow your list by 10,000 subscribers at no cost to you

Apart from the second statement sounding much better and adding a personal touch, your avoiding some of the trigger words that might send your email to the dreaded spam box.

But please, don’t think your clever and try to bypass these filters. It might work, but really? You look stupid when your email contains something like:

10,000 F.ree subscribers for your list

This concept should be familiar to you because it revolves around building trust with your email list. It boils down to the fact they gave you their email address with the impression you’r somebody they can trust. If you start sending emails that land in the spam box or ones that have the ‘spam’ feel at all and it’s a sure-fire way to loose subscribers.

A small compilation of these tricks

In my eyes, type an email like this and your begging to loose credibility – are you that desperate to get that word in the email? Now I know I might get some flack for this, and several marketers who do extremely well use this technique, but I don’t care.

Death by hyperlinks

There’s a chance that when you build your first list that your eager to start earning some money. And as we know, email marketing can be a great way to do this. But, there can be such a thing as sending out too much links in your emails. Again, this closely relates to the concept of building trust with your email list, and whilst you may not end up in the spam box for too much links you may end up loosing subscribers because they feel their being spammed with affiliate products all the time.

Let me unsubscribe… I’ll do anything

Another practice that might make subscribers and possibly email service companies classify your emails as spam is how easy it is to unsubscribe. Now it might seem a trivial thing, but spammers are notorious for this, their unsubscribe links only work about .05% of the time. Now I’m not saying that email marketers are the same (in fact in accordance with spam laws they must include an unsubscribe link at the bottom of each email), but some try to subconsciously direct you away from the unsubscribe button by padding out the bottom of the email.

Unsure what this means? Take a look at the following image and all is explained:

Why the need for all that space?

Do you see what I mean? There is absolutely no need for that much space to appear from the marketer’s name down to the unsubscribe section of the email. It’s annoying and something that I hate. If your sending out good, quality content to your subscribers then there is absolutely no need for you to be doing this.

Only scratching the surface

Now were only scratching the surface here, but the two points above are what I consider to be two of the most important point to help make sure your email list isn’t classified as spam – either by your subscribers or the email service companies. Please leave your comments below if you agree, disagree or have something else to add to the list.