While many email marketing specialists commit valuable time, resources and efforts to create huge bulk campaigns, they often get discouraged once they start seeing email deliverability numbers. One of the many reasons why their emails are constantly bouncing back (or getting flagged as spam, even) could be the ever-evolving spam filtering mechanism.
The purpose of spam filters is as simple as going through emails to identify authentic versus unsolicited mail, but the filtering process is becoming more and more sophisticated with each passing year (especially with the recent growth of machine learning and AI).
Today, there are laws in place to try to control spam and thousands of unique filtering methods of different email providers. If email marketing or bulk email campaigns play a crucial part in your overall business strategy, learning how to avoid spam filters is paramount for your long-term success.
Only a few known spam filtering mechanisms surfaced in the recent years, mostly due to their secretive nature - identifying trigger words is perhaps the oldest and the most obvious, but even that is often overlooked by email marketing specialists around the globe.
What’s a trigger word?
Triggers are words or character combinations commonly used in spam (junk) emails. Using trigger words will skyrocket your chances of ending up in the recipient’s spam box, and might damage your overall sender reputation score, too. Before we proceed to the list of trigger words, here are a few extra triggers to avoid while crafting your bulk email campaigns:
- Triggers in subject lines. One of the first things a recipient of your email sees is the subject line, and therefore spam filters search for trigger words there first. Email subjects are often overlooked, but taking your time and crafting an original subject line can reduce the risk of having your message blocked or marked as “spam”.
- Deceptive emails are considered spam triggers due to their nature. Companies often use deceptive subject lines with false or misleading information to generate better email open rates (e.g. Re: Meeting on Wednesday, John?). Emails with deceptive subjects violate anti-spam laws, and get flagged as spam a lot more often than emails with original, thought-out subject lines.
- Special characters. While some marketers report that they’ve seen an increase in their email open rates by using special characters, certain spam filters recognize them as triggers. Special characters are Unicode symbols (☀ ☆ ☂ ☻ ♞), and that makes them extremely vulnerable to spam filters.
With that being said, here are 100 triggers to avoid in your email campaigns:
Any combination of these words will increase your chances of triggering spam filters:
Think of your email as a conversation opener, not an attention grabber. A key to a successful email campaign and better overall deliverability is creating purposeful emails and subject lines, including relevant information and addressing the pain points of your potential customers.
