This is an issue that our clients bring up all the time. How can you make sure that your marketing e-mails reach their intended recipients? The quick answer is: you can’t. All one can do is to follow some simple guidelines that will increase the chances of successful delivery.

1. Use descriptive and engaging subject lines; don’t use “spammy" words!
2. Use a good “from” e-mail address, not a commercial sounding one like “info@abc.com” or “sales@abc.com”
3. Don’t send one big graphic as the e-mail, even if the graphic shows a lot of good text. Use as much real text as possible while avoiding the words mentioned in item #1.
4. Ask that your customers add your “from” e-mail address to their address books.

Your customers can throw up an intimidating gauntlet (sometimes quite unintentionally) with several layers of spam filtering and there is no sure way to bypass them. After all, you have no way of knowing which filters might be in place and the “bypass” rules for each filter. But using the tactics listed here will increase the likelihood that your message will be seen.