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Spam Emails: How to Avoid Becoming What You Hate

How to Avoid Getting Your Emails Spammed

 
  • Legitimate business contacts are sometimes confused for spam emails
  • The best ways to stay out of the spam filter are to be careful with words
  • Boom Demand makes it easy for you not to worry about being spammy
  Even after decades of changing strategies, cold emailing is still one of the pillars of B2B sales outreach. You can call and try to connect on LinkedIn all you want, but some prospects hide behind firewalls of gatekeepers or just aren’t interested in social media. Sometimes, there’s just no other way to reach a potential prospect than by sending them an email out of the blue. This is important because if an email is how they prefer to hear from you, you want to be sure they’ll actually get it. Now, no one likes getting spam emails, including you. They’re a huge waste of time and often not just spam, but outright scams. That’s why so many people are leery of cold emails. It’s also why email service providers continue to develop increasingly sophisticated filters to make sure we never see the seedy underbelly of the internet.

Confusing Cold Approaches With Spam Emails

Sales professionals have the responsibility to do all they can to be seen as respectable and legitimate. That’s why their outgoing messages have to be both creative and attention-grabbing, but also truly helpful. A problem arises when you realize that many of your legitimate business proposals are likely to contain language that’s very similar to the wording of spam emails. Spammers do this on purpose, to create the illusion of legitimacy. They also try to be enticing. You’re both trying to create interest, but they’re doing it specifically to snooker their victims. Unfortunately, that puts the burden on the sales professional to be even more careful. The reason for this is because of the advanced spam filters used by email administrators.

What NOT to Do If You Want to Reach The Inbox

IBM’s SecurityIntelligence blog provides some insight into how spam filters function, and what are the biggest things to avoid doing to prevent your emails from getting trapped in their webs:
“There’s no one rule for how spam filters work. Each has its own quirks. Some frown on email sent from free services like Hotmail and Gmail, for example, or may downgrade messages targeted just to an email address without an accompanying name. Each engine is unique. Fortunately, email administrators can manipulate most of these settings to their liking… “The art of spam filtering comes into play when analyzing the contents of a message. This is where the best filters shine, but it’s also where legitimate messages can end up in spam purgatory. “Some content tactics are almost certain to land a message in the spam folder. Emails containing attached executable files or links to blacklisted websites are sure giveaways, as are those with common spam keywords. A few years ago, many spam filters flagged emails containing short codes from services like bit.ly and 3.ly. With the profusion of short codes spawned by Twitter, however, that tactic is less common today.”

Words Not to Use

Beyond those kinds of suspicious blunders regarding attached content files, the most important thing you can do to avoid getting your cold emails lumped together with spam emails is to be careful of the specific words you use. The basic rule is to not sound too pushy, or too-good-to-be-true. Exclamation points in your subject line, especially when combined with words like “free!” and “act now!” are screaming neon red flags to spam filters. Most of the time, sales professionals shouldn’t have any need to resort to desperate language like that. Just in case you want to be sure, though, you can find some excellent and fairly comprehensive lists of the kinds of words you should avoid using in your email content here and here. It can be easy to feel overwhelmed by looking at those long lists, but it’s important to remember that they apply first and foremost to subject lines. Your subject lines, along with the coded headers that you don’t see, are what the filters comb through. If you have legitimate reasons for including those words in the body of your message, don’t sweat it. As long as you don’t overuse them, they should be okay.

Let Boom Demand Handle Your Email Work

If you’d rather not worry about this kind of problem at all, that’s a great reason to let Boom Demand and our professional team of Sales Development Representatives take on your outreach tasks. Our SDRs accelerate your entire sales funnel by finding and driving warm leads directly to your top salespeople. Your teams can switch from traditional, comprehensive sales tasks to working as specialized account executives. You can spend all day building and closing deals with the leads we bring in! We do this by focusing on a specialized cadence of contact points, expertly using the phone, social media, and of course email to reach your prospects. Our emails go out on an individualized basis, using the most effective wording possible to turn cold leads into warm prospects. Contact us today to stop worrying about accidentally sending out spam emails, and accelerate your sales growth, instead!

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