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!

Emailing Volunteers

Do you know if your email message is being read by your volunteers? You subject line or return email address could be the problem. Before you send that email to your volunteers, make sure you check the words that you're using in your subject line, and make sure to use a return email address that the volunteer will recognize.

A recent Email Sender and Provider Coalition (ESPC) study showed that 80 percent of respondents decide whether to click on the "Report Spam" or "Junk" button without opening the actual message, and that 73 percent based that decision on the "From" name while 69 percent based the decision on the subject line.

You should aim for 35 characters in your subject line (and spaces do count as characters), and anything over 55 characters will get cut off by your volunteer's email system.

You would hate for your message, or you as a sender to be labeled as "spam" so take a few seconds to check the return email address and subject line before you hit "send".