Shel Horowitz's Monthly Frugal Marketing Tip Vol. 6, No. 10, March 2003

Last month, I alluded to the problem of filtering software that blocks suspected spam, and explained why I used a somewhat bland headline for my newsletter, rather than the much more dynamic headline I used in the body of the article.

Following up on that, and on the July 2002 Tipsheet on E-mailing the Media http://www.frugalmarketing.com/m6-3.shtml, I want to talk a bit this month about the differences in e-mailing now, compared with a year ago--and next month, I'll give some extra pointers if you're mailing to the media; it's worth revisiting.

More and more ISPs are filtering suspected spam. And more and more users have installed spam filters of their own. Because of the filtering, and because e-mail reliability is significantly down compared with a year ago, you can no longer assume that your e-mail actually got delivered.

This drastically alters how you write e-mail copy, and especially, e-mail subject lines. For example, here are a few things you want to *avoid*:

* Words that are used often by spammers (for instance, a four-letter "f- word" that means "doesn't cost anything"

* Trying to fool the spam filter by adding extra letters or changing one letter to an asterisk or other symbol (won't work very long, as the filters are constantly updated--yet I've seen experienced e-marketers who ought to know better resorting to this dumb trick)

* Exclamation points or dollar signs in a subject line

* Excessive capitalization, either in the subject line or in the body (You might notice I moved away from capitalized headlines a few months back)

* HTML formatted e-mail with bold, color, fancy typefaces, etc. (I personally hate HTML newsletters anyway, and--like many experienced users--keep HTML turned off. If you want to show people a formatted version, give them a link to a web page!)

* E-mail addresses from the very popular and much-abused services such as hotmail, yahoo, msn, and aol (domains are so cheap! There are a dozen reasons why you should have your own domain, and that's one of them)

This can be quite a challenge. I was recently hired to create an opt-in mailing for a financial planner/debt counselor offering a no-charge seminar. Of course, I couldn't use the f-word--or de b t, m o ney, among others (spaces are intentional above, but I'd never use them for a client or to the media). I ended up running with "No-Cost Teleclass Thurs: Control Your Finances, Don't Let Them Control You" -- far weaker than I'd like to use, but something that won't set off the alarms.

(BTW, I finally found a decent program for the Mac, which allows me to check all of its flagged mail, read it from within the spam filter, rescue it, or trash it. I get at least 100 junk mails a day, sometimes twice that, so for me, this is a crucial tool--but I wouldn't get one until I found one that allows me to double-check it--and a good thing, because at least four or five important mails get caught every day. I'm using Spamfire, and if you have a Mac, I recommend it highly--I think it cost $18).

Thank you reading this back issue of Shel Horowitz's Monthly Frugal Marketing Tips, published every month since May, 1997; please click here to view the complete archives, grouped by subject. Shel is an internationally known copywriter and marketing consultant, author of Grassroots Marketing Getting Noticed in a Noisy World, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and several other books, and creator of the Frugal Marketing web site. Please click here to contact Shel.