11 Strategies to Avoid Getting Your E-Newsletter Caught By Filters

As the amount of e-mails sent to consumers and donors has increased, the use of e-mail filters to sort spam and unwanted e-mails has as well. An e-newsletter that gets caught in a filter and fails to get delivered is a missed opportunity to touch a would-be donor or build a relationship with a long-time constituent.

Nancy Schwartz, president of marketing and communications firm Nancy Schwartz & Company, says there are techniques that nonprofits can employ so their e-newsletters don’t get caught in filters. She touches on these in the article “Avoiding Filters — 11 Tips for E-Newsletter Success,” which appears on her Web site. Recently, she took some time to run through the basics of each of the 11 tips.

1. Research your e-newsletter service provider. This has implications for all of your e-touches. Make sure your service provider is on the white list (protected list) of personal e-mail service providers such as AOL, Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo! — to name a few — so your messages will get through.

2. Only send your e-newsletter to those who opt in. Schwartz says a single opt-in process is essential (actually, a legal requirement). You can’t just add people’s names to an e-newsletter subscriber list. A double opt-in policy is even better and prevents spammers from registering for your e-newsletter. When people subscribe to your e-newsletter, send them an e-mail that includes a link that they must click on to confirm their subscription.

3. Make it easy for e-newsletter recipients to unsubscribe or change their subscriber information. “In our increasingly transitory world, folks are changing jobs and e-mail providers all the time, so you want to make it easy for your subscribers to manage their subscription, as a courtesy,” Schwartz says.

4. Once you’ve drafted and formatted your e-newsletter, run it through a spam filter. How many times do you use all caps? How many times do you include words such as “click” and “free”? These words are red alerts for spam filters. Use the spam filter test to see what can be corrected so that what you deliver is as clean as it can be.

5. Test, test, test. Schwartz says she has e-mail accounts at most of the major e-mail service providers so that she can send test versions of her e-newsletter to all of her e-mail addresses to ensure proper delivery before sending it out to the entire subscription list. “Formatting can differ from e-mail provider to e-mail provider,” she adds. “I always want to know that the e-newsletter is going to land in my subscriber’s mailbox looking good and easily readable and all the links will work.”

6. Send subscribers a welcome e-mail when they sign up for your e-newsletter. Some e-newsletter service providers will have this as an automatic function. In this e-mail you can alert subscribers to what the “From” and “Subject” lines for your e-newsletter will be, so they know what to look for.

7. Ask subscribers to add the “from” e-mail address to their inbox “white list” of approved senders so your e-newsletter is not filtered into a junk or spam folder.

8. Beware of trigger words and phrases that have been flagged by filters because they are typical in spam messages. Some of them are “click here,” “congratulations,” “free,” “special promotion,” “dear friend,” “unsubscribe” and “winner.”

9. Don’t send your e-newsletter as an attachment. Attachments are a burden for recipients to have to download and run through virus protection. Either send your e-newsletter within an e-mail format or send an e-mail with a link to the e-newsletter.

10. Give subscribers the option to receive your e-newsletter as text rather than html. And be sure that your e-newsletter service provider offers the capability for the e-newsletter to automatically switch to text format for those subscribers who can’t receive html.

11. Don’t send your e-newsletter as a blind copy to everyone on your subscriber list. “It’s hard to believe, but there are still folks who are sending out an e-newsletter to, let’s say, 500 subscribers via their own e-mail; just plugging those 500 names into the “bcc” field in an e-mail form,” Schwartz says. “Actually, I’m working with an organization that’s very sophisticated in many other ways but they just didn’t know.”

The chances are great that an e-newsletter sent this way will be caught by a filter. This has implications not only for your e-newsletter. If the e-mail is sent from an organizational e-mail address, then your organization will be identified as a spammer. “Not only are you decreasing the chances of receipt of the e-newsletter, you’re really causing a problem for regular e-mail correspondence for you and your colleagues,” she adds.

If you implement this advice and get your e-newsletter to a point where it avoids filters, the next question is what to include in your e-newsletter. Schwartz says it should be concisely written so as to engage readers quickly. “E-newsletter readers, even more than your print readers, have less patience because it’s just so easy to move from one piece of content to another online. It’s been proven that people register what’s on their computer screen for about a tenth of a second and make a decision whether to continue reading or not,” she says.

Keep content pithy and succinct, in the top inch of the e-newsletter so it’s viewable in a preview pane, and include what Schwartz calls a “mini table of contents” that links to each element in the e-newsletter.

Nancy Schwartz can be reached via www.nancyschwartz.com