Thanks and keep up the great content…!!

James

I wrote about this almost two years ago on my blog:-

http://www.frankhaywood.com/ever-received-email-with-words-like-free-in-them/

The comments I made then are as true today…

(There’s a link on that post to an article Tom Kulzer of Aweber wrote around the time saying don’t use word variations as it hurts you, with a good explanation of why.)

Your email deliverability is reduced to ZERO using word variations (I GUARANTEE sys and network admins know a lot about marketers and their tactics). Using those variations will mark you loudly and clearly as a spammer to them, even if you use double opt-in and you consider yourself as clean as the driven snow.

And let’s not forget readability. It drives me mental (it REALLY does), to see to see typos in my own work let alone emails I’m receiving from other marketers. 😉

So deliberately adding in mistakes in a vain attempt to get through spam filters is a bad move for both the reasons above.

Here they are again:-

#1 – They get filtered at the mail providers network level so your carefully crafted emails don’t even make it to your subscribers spambox, let alone inbox.

#2 – It hurts readability and the flow of your email.

Just don’t do it.

-Frank Haywood

As an internet marketer, however, you can get away with it to some extent because you are not perceived to be a real professional. Sadly, most internet marketers are held in the same contempt as spammers and scammers and they only have themselves to blame.

So I have to agree with John. If you don’t want to tarnish your image and you do want to gain some respect, don’t do what the vast majority of internet marketers do.

Just my two cents!

Nick

Regards to all
John O’York

I think you knew you were going to throw the cat among the pigeons when you wrote this!
I kinda agree and kinda disagree … does that make sense?
What I mean is that I do sometimes disguise the word ‘free’ as it is a spam blocker keyword and there’s not much point being marked as spam for the sake of a little apostrophe, I know what you are going to say here “use it in a different context” well, I think that no matter how you dress up the sentence with ‘free’ it is still going to mess with the spam filters, I don’t care what aweber scores it at. Another thing to remember is that these spam/filters are all interlinked, so if you’re down as a spammer in one, chances are you will be marked in a lot more.
Saying all that the amount of people we are talking about here is negligible compared to the list size!
Damn, you nearly got me off on a rant there!

Later,

Dave.

TomH Said: And Randy, and others, do we really need to do the LOL thing after every sentence that may be in disagreement with the original comment? Really!

LOL at Tom!… 😀

Now lets get back on topic!

For starters, I completely agree with what John is saying, but I ALSO agree with what Randy is saying! Now some of you might not know were I’m going with this next comment, but I’ll do my best to explain things!

Spelling/Grammar Errors!

Do you still just delete these emails if you don’t understand what someone is saying?! I meam lookd at this, completely accidental, but I bet sone of you just ignore whats I’m trying to put accross right?! (Yeah, I just just put some errors to try and prove a point!)

So Mark, how come you don’t mind reading these emails with 0 $ ‘ * or even .???? Well the answer in my eyes is pretty simple, I can see through them and just see what kind of content the marketer is trying to send me! Heck if I unsubscribed from people who ever bothered to do something like what John is talking about then I wouldn’t be on many lists, if any!

I mean look, Omar got around 40% more clicks because of it! There ain’t no point having a list, that is if you’ve started building one, and sending out followups or even broadcasts and nobody opening it! – Talk about a waste of time if nobody opens! 😉

Well that’s either added to the debate, or maybe just irritated a few more people! Whatever it has, John AND Randy both have a point they make!

Thanks
Mark
Mark-McWilliams.com

People really should know that spam bots are “clever” enough to see right past the trickery. Dan Thies also tells us that there is substantial evidence that Google takes into account the use of the word FREE, (and all the spammy counter measures), when it sits in judgment of how to index our pages or award quality score. Using the word “free” in its natural form is less likely to hurt you than trying to be clever.

I also use Aweber and just sending out emails with normal content and using free, money and so on has not been an issue. To get the Aweber spamometer up to 5 and over is mind boggling. (Note to self; Gotta give this a go!)

Email delivery is an issue and I am not sure it is possible to put a realistic figure on this. My reason for saying this is that if we take Yahoo for instance, (I believe AOL is even worse), there is no rhyme no reason to what it delivers and when. Important non IM emails may get delivered, may be filtered to the spam box or may get rejected or lost so you never see them. Additionally it may take anything from an hour to a week to receive an email. This is regardless of the content and “spammy” words.

The procedure for junk email is exactly the same and may be delivered, filtered or lost so trying to figure out the delivery rate for certain words I believe is an exercise in futility for us mere mortals and even geeks with funds and resources to research this stuff can at best only obtain an approximation or trend.

To me the all important point is that if you give good content people will read your stuff – assuming it gets delivered 😉 It’s no more complicated than that.

Take John for instance. He used a subject line a while back “$5000 in 9 days!” Almost anybody else sending me this and I will unsubscribe.

The thing is with John I know this Subject line is true and there is valuable content to follow otherwise it’s just from some marketing wannabee who doesn’t know Jack trying to sell me an affiliate program they have probably never even bought.

Forget the spam filters and Google though. Readers are becoming savvy enough nowadays to see right past all this nonsense and they don’t need an algorithm loaded into them to instantly spot all variations of Free.

A real pet hate of mine is people using Re: in the subject line to draw attention and attempt to fool the spam filters into thinking it’s a reply. Unsubscribe.

If people just gave out good content and treated their list with respect, then resorting to Subject line / body content spam trickery is not even an issue for discussion.

OK, I think I have strayed off topic somewhat so it’s time to stop.

Ade

You know what I really hate? I hate it when someone puts the same link over and over and OVER in their email.

Robbin
http://auctionriches.com

Good topic. I have thought of this too, it kind of ties into the concept of defining Internet Marketing Ethics. If one wants to be ‘good’ which is better in the long run anyway then how do you determine where that line is?

My thought is, everyone is different. Just like any business, everyone is unique in how they apply and work their business, including marketing to potential customers. As potential consumers, most of us are pretty used to this varied approaches anyway. So, my thought is to “go with your gut” if it feels wrong, don’t do it. If you don’t feel it is wrong, then proceed. Maybe try testing to see what happens to your list. Go to sleep at night feeling you have operated fairly and with integrity, chances are your business will do better for it in the long run.

Cheers!

Jeromy AKA Hillbilly