...and the toughest spam filter award goes to....

... your subscriber!

Stefan Pollard in his ClickZ post yesterday summed up why this is so and provides some advice. He says:

The toughest spam filter you face is not found at a major ISP or in a spam-reporting service. It's actually the one in your recipient's mind.

This "mind filter" determines whether an e-mail gets opened, marked as spam, or deleted without opening. No e-mail delivery service can guarantee passage past this most strict filter.

You get a head start, though, when you understand the conditions under which your recipients are looking at your e-mail and removing as many barriers as possible.

Your e-mail has to answer these three "W" questions in the first two to five seconds that a recipient looks at it, whether in the inbox or message body:

        * Who sent this e-mail?

        * What's in it for me?

        * What do you want me to do?

If your e-mail doesn't answer those questions right away, you risk failing the mind filter.

That leads to higher spam complaints, which hurts your sender reputation and drives down your deliverability. Besides increasing your list churn, readers who don't spam-button you might simply stop acting on your e-mails, which increases inactivity.

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Comments

[Ed]

There's a fourth item on my own list of filters and it actually comes first....

"How much is this gonna cost me?"