Is your Email Making it through Spam Filters?

Do you know if your email is making it through your volunteer's email spam filters?

There are many elements to making your email more deliverable, but let's just focus for the moment on the "from" and the subject line of your email.

From Line

This should be your organization's name - something that your volunteer will recognize. I would discourage you from using your volunteer manager's name - someone they might not know. If they can't recognize who the email is from, there's a good chance that they are going to hit "delete" before even opening.

Subject Line

Here are some tips to make sure your subject line is not inadvertently looking like spam:

• Don't use an exclamation point.
• The use of all caps, even if it's just one word, is a red flag.
• Don't deliberately misspell words (and don't do it accidentally either).
• Avoid non-standard characters.
  
• Only use necessary punctuation. In most cases, at most you might need a comma or dash.
• If you're using an apostrophe, make sure it's straight, not "smart." And don't copy any such punctuation from Microsoft Word to paste into your subject line - they copy as non-standard characters.
• Avoid "spammy" (not sure if this is a word, but it should be) words like "free", "limited time", "buy now", "performance", "you're receiving this message because".
• Curious about other spammy words? Check out a full list here.

My next post will cover blunders that you might commit in the text of your email or based on the type of email you're sending...stay tuned!