Is Free a Dirty Word?

July 24th, 2008 Chris Posted in E-mail, Email | No Comments »

Last post, I discussed the scourge of evil “free” offers and how they can be used for good… But how do you get that message to your users. Especially with email where you always run the danger of being tagged as a spammer?

We have debated the use of “Free” in our emails to our base. Would it get through or would it be stopped as spam. For about a year, we’ve avoided it and used terms like “no-cost”, “complimentary” or “it’s fizzle my bizzle” (that one’s just for Snoop).

All those words are lammo campared to FREE but if half the emails aren’t going to get through ’cause they get tagged as spam, then it’s better not to…

So, like most things, we put it to the test… And the envelope please…

“Free” kicked butt – again and again, our response rates have been higher using the word. Debate closed!

But not so fast: that one word is just one of the myriad of factors used to decide if your email is spam. The reputation of your sending ISP to the percentage of HTML code versus text to the use of specific words can all impact your score. And of course, it varies from one spam filter solution to another.

If you’re a big company, you’ve likely got an email provider with all sorts of helpful services on this front. As a micro business, however, it’s tougher.

What do we do? We take a sample of our emails (a newsletter, a sales tip, a promotional offer, etc…) and run it through a great service from Campaign Monitor. They do a bunch of stuff but one thing that we use is their spam testing service where for about 10 bucks, you can test your email against a variety of spam filters (example screen shown below).

Occasionally test your emails, find out what is driving your spam rating and fix it. That way you’ll maximize the number of emails that actually get to your clients and prospects. And you can say “Free”.

Chris