Bulk emailing as part of your marketing process seems easy, fast, and effective. The problem is that your recipients don’t always see it that way. Potential customers are quick to label unsolicited email as spam, and internet service providers (ISPs) have stepped in to reduce the amount of spam that reaches their customer’s inbox.

While a lot of unwanted email is truly spam, you may have a legitimate message you want to send out. Below are a few tips to ensure that your bulk emailing efforts are not labeled as spam. While you could argue that these tips are sort of common sense, they are very important, so we felt it was worth writing about them.

1. Use a legitimate email service. If you try to send one email to a huge list of people from your standard email program, like Microsoft Outlook, your own ISP might stop the process. Bulk emailing services and programs stagger email delivery into smaller chunks so email services aren’t overwhelmed and your email isn’t labeled as spam before it leaves your ISP.

2. Learn the conditions that trigger spam filters. Many spam filters assign a score to certain triggers and add up the scores. If the total score exceeds a certain threshold, the email is labeled as spam. Some of these triggers include: heavy use of HTML, specific “unwanted” keywords, subject lines that include text in all capitals and generic salutations, such as “Dear friend”.

3. Work with a professional company to create your email. A firm that is experienced with email marketing will know what to include and what to avoid when creating your campaigns. As a result, your emails are more likely to be read by your recipients and not end up caught by a spam filter.

This post obviously just scratches the surface of increasing email deliverability. Do you have any tips you’d like to add? Comment below.