I decided to build a prospecting email that would be like none other. I added my company’s history as well as mine. So far so good… but now the creative juices were starting to flow. I put a coupon in it and of course tweaking my signature for that lasting impression. Embedded our BBB rating and my LinkedIn link with image buttons they could click on. I leaned back and was well pleased. That was until I found out I had made a spam email.

In following up, I called each lead contact and much to my surprise they had never received any correspondence from me. At first I thought, “Right buddy there’s no way you would have missed my masterpiece”. I even went so far as to put in the subject line, in bold, NOT JUNK MAIL. After a couple of these calls I soon realized they were indeed not getting the emails. A couple of them offered to check their filter and found them there. My prospecting efforts had become spam. This, of course, would not do and I immediately went into research mode to find a better way to build emails. I needed to get around the infamous spam filters. Let me share with you some of my new found knowledge.

“I’d rather send out a mass email then hang posters all over the place.” -Todd Barry

No Spam

The good news is there are better ways to format and distribute email. The bad news is I had pretty much broke every rule and thus my masterpiece became spam. In an effort to keep you from going through the pain I did I have listed some ways you can protect yourself. I would also suggest you “google” something like “trigger list filter email delete” as there are many opinions on this subject. Here we go…

1.) Don’t use italics and very large fonts.
2.) Don’t use different fonts and WORDS IN UPPERCASE.
3.) Don’t use white text on a graphical background.
4.) Don’t embed images.
5.) Avoid using forms in the email.
6.) Avoid words which have a high Spam score.
7.) Do not send your HTML-based newsletter without a text-delivery option.
8.) Don’t send attachments.
9.) Avoid using BCC distribution.

I also found there are some great third party software options to help as well. Litmus is one you should check out. If you’re not seeing any results from your hard work chances are you’re being spam filtered.

Chris Lott

Chris has over 15 year’s Sales Management experience including Business Ownership, Product Management and Web Design/Marketing. He’s a national sales team strategist and trainer. Chris is the designer of the popular totallysales™ sales playbook with thousands of copies downloaded. He’s a nationally syndicated author with his articles on SalesBlog! rated as a “top must-read” on consultative selling.