Lower your spam score
Your spam score is determined by a large number of checks performed on the content of your email document plus some DNS based checks. Most rules are based on regular expressions that are matched against the body or header fields of the message. It recognizes words like Viagra and Casino in your document, but also whether the from address of the message exists or not.
To view the spam score of your document, click on the errors and warnings function in the bottom toolbar below your email document.
For the best delivery results, it is advised to lower your spam score as much as possible. Getting a spam score lower than 1 is fairly easy to accomplish (unless your email is about products for certain body part increment or about gambling with large revenues). If your spam score is above 3, we strongly recommend you to not send the mail. If the spam score is larger than 5, you cannot send the message at all.
Here are some quick wins to lower your spam score
Create a text version
The email message should have a text version. The textual content of it should not completely differ from the HTML message.
Avoid usage of spam sensitive words and phrases
Avoid words like Cialis, Levitra, soma, valium, Xanax, talks about price per dose, mentions of other drugs and their chemical names, pharmacy, Viagra, fast delivery, attempts to disguise words like Viagra and porn. In short: avoid all words that spammers also frequently use. Do not disguise words, or use misspellings of forbidden words.
Use normal text inside hyperlinks, instead of the URL
Do not create hyperlinks that have the URL between the opening and closing tag, because some email clients interpret this as a phishing attempt.
Example:
<a href="http://www.google.com">http://www.google.com</a>
<a href="http://www.google.com">www.google.com</a>Because the original link is replaced by your tracking domain the link will be blocked because email clients will find this discrepancy misleading to subscribers. Better do something like this:
<a href="http://www.google.com">Click here to visit a great search engine</a>
Use a proper from address
- Do not end your from address name with digits (e.g., do not use info123@yourcompany.com.
- Do not start your from address with digits (666info@yourcompany.com).
- Always use a from address. Do not use a free mail address as from address (Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, Chello, et cetera).
- Do not capitalize your from address or subject line. Avoid using capitalization in your message body.
Use a proper subject line
- Avoid using dollar amounts in your subject line.
- Do not talk about losing pounds or weight loss in your subject line.
- Do not try to appeal to subscribers with false promises.
Avoid HTML errors, unsupported techniques, obscure content, obfuscation
- Do not use JavaScript, Flash, forms, and other unsupported techniques.
- Do not use an HTML font colour similar to background, large font sizes, and lots of different font colours.
- Do not hide text (for example using CSS display none) or other content hiding techniques.
Images
- Use short image names. 1.jpg is better than header.jpg
- Your email should not contain large images, and must have a normal image/text ratio
HTML
- Remove any unneeded HTML. Remove HTML errors as much as possible. Keep your HTML code clean.