Sending marketing emails avoiding SPAM

At a recent meeting a question was raised about creating marketing emails that avoid your important communication being either labelled as SPAM or landing in the Junk folder of the recepient.

It's a hard one because receiving unwanted emails can be annoying and there are so many tools available that put the user in control of what they receive.

So, can you improve your chances or sending emails to your customer and get your message or promotion in front of them.

email creation tips

1. ISP's filter emails and look at the subject headers to see what words are being used and this is one of the ways your communication can get blocked. Further to this a company's system may filter and then finally the individual's email system may filter. Consequently your email might not get through as you intended.
2. Ensure that everything is spelt correctly and the title of the email is completed. Try and avoid certain words - see references sites below for ideas on the words to avoid.
3. Plain text emails are actually less likely to get posted to the junk folder or get through the corporate firewall, but clearly HTML based emails will look better
4. If you are creating an HTML based email try and ensure that all the coding is correct - it will need to be thoroughly tested
5. Create a friends list and test out your prospective marketing emails and get feedback on both the content to see if it working as intended and to also see if it landed into their email box 

Some useful reference sites

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spam
2. http://www.sophos.com/security/best-practice/spam.html
3. http://directmarketing.thomsonlocal.com/Win/Email-Marketing/How-to-Avoid-Spam-Filters/
4. http://www.bloomtools.com/articles/spam-trigger-words-to-avoid.html