How to beat the spam filters—legitimately

In his tip-laden presentation at this week’s Annual Catalog Conference in San Francisco, marketing expert Herschell Gordon Lewis reserved some of his most pointed remarks for advice on how to beat increasingly fine-woven spam filters. Lewis characterized the development of spam filters in the last two years as “the sword of Damocles over our necks. They’re like guys in a war movie who pull out a machine gun and spray bullets everywhere” hitting the innocent and guilty alike. Quoting a study which concluded that 38% of e-mail messages caught in spam filters were not spam, Lewis declared that legitimate e-mail marketers “have to get better at avoiding spam filters.”

The best way to insure that promotional e-mail messages slip past spam filters, Lewis said, is to avoid words and symbols in subject lines that trigger the filters. On the top of that list is the word that has ruled direct marketing for years: free. Putting that word in a subject line of an e-mail will almost certainly activate a spam filter, said Lewis. “The word ‘free’ has always worked well in direct marketing, and it has survived there for a 100 years,” he said. “But it may have been eclipsed with e-mail in the day of the spam filter.”

But, Lewis added, there are ways to convey a free offer without using the word itself. Hence, an offer of free shipping can be communicated with the phase, “Shipping is on us, of course,” or with the headline that reads: “We never charge for shipping.”

Lewis cautioned that other “apparently harmless” words should be avoided in subject lines of e-mail messages lest they trigger spam filters. They include: complimentary, sale or discount, fun, prize, buy, own, approved or approval, increase, size, compare, cash, loan or mortgage, save or saving, win and Viagra. The same is true of dollar and cents signs, ampersands, percentage signs and trademark symbols. “These (words and symbols) are like dodo birds,” he said. “They are going into oblivion, but not happily so. If you avoid using them in the subject line, you will avoid most spam filters.”

Another method e-mail marketers are using to outmaneuver span filters is the now ubiquitous opt-in marketing newsletter. But, cautioned Lewis, while such e-mail communications may bypass spam filters, they often do not convert prospects to buyers. “A marketing newsletter is a porous e-mail bandage that is less exciting than a one-to-one e-mail offer,” argued Lewis. “They get respect, but they don’t sell. Building respect for the sender is not parallel to getting a response to a direct offer.”

Still, Lewis said newsletters could be effective e-mail marketing tools if direct marketers follow a couple of basic rules in developing them. “If you are going to use them, make sure you load them up with information of use to the recipients,” said Lewis. “They are looking for news from newsletters, not advertising messages.” But to make sure that newsletters are also selling tools, Lewis advised his audience to “load them up with a lot of deals.”