Increase Your Sales without Jeopardizing Your Reputation


by Rod - Date: 2007-03-02 - Word Count: 568 Share This!

Online marketers know the importance of internet marketing campaign. Most marketers, if not all are convinced that good marketing strategy is the key for their companies' progress. Online marketing campaign aims to promote product or service to prospects, and convert these prospects into customers. Basically, online marketing uses SEO (Search Engine Optimization), this will improve your placement in search engine listings. Another thing is sending follow up messages for those who have visited your site and opted-in for mailings.

One of the major problems online marketers are facing nowadays is fighting spam filters from flagging their legitimate emails as unwanted, unsolicited, etc. Stringent spam filters tend to hamper internet marketing. If you are running an online business, you have to know what a spam filter is, and what does it do. Spam filter detects unsolicited emails which are often offensive - promoting violence, pornography and the like. But because unethical senders keep on looking for ways to make there emails look legitimate, spam filters become aggressive in detecting unwanted messages, but since these filters are not perfect there are false-positive and false-negative. False-positive emails are emails flagged as spam, although they are not. On the other hand false-negative occurs whenever a filter fails to detect a spam message as spam.

As an online marketer, you have to be aware of the different filtering strategies employed by spam filters of mail administrators and ISPs, so that you would be able to make your emails legitimate not just in nature but as well as in appearance, preventing them from being blocked. Most filters use content assessment - looking for a word or a phrase that is associated to spam. Another type of filter is the Bayesian filter, where the filter is accustomed to good and bad emails. During the ‘training' the messages are broken into tokens and these tokens are then stored into databases (tokens obtained from legitimate emails are separated from those obtained from spam). In addition, there is a Whitelist-Blacklist type of filter. This filter would simply allow you message to reach the inbox if you are listed on its whitelist, otherwise your message will be blocked.
There is also a Challenge-Response filter where you are challenge to do further actions before your message gets to your prospect's inbox.

(Preventing your message from being flagged as spam and making your message reach your prospects' inbox)

To ensure deliverability of your newsletters, make your message appears unspammy. Learn the words, phrases or symbols to be avoided in a subject line, such as the word ‘free', #, $, etc. Encourage your prospects to place you in their whitelist if they are using a whitelist-blacklist filter. If you want to know more about email deliverability, try checking www.emailreach.com.

To prevent your message from being flagged as spam use a double opt-in, this means that your prospects are required to confirm their intentions on your updates and follow ups before you add them into your database for mailing. This would give you an idea of who are interested on your product with a little possibility of getting reported as spam. Another thing is, make your opt-out procedure easy, just like attaching an opt-out link on emails to be sent or simply require your prospects to send an empty email whenever they decide to undo their subscription. Once you impose a tedious procedure for opting out, your prospects might report your message as spam to expedite their unsubscription.

Related Tags: internet marketing, email marketing, spam, online marketing, spam filter, filter, content assessment, email delivery

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