Content is a primary factor in inbox placement. Testing against spam filters simply isn’t enough these days, because the ISPs are more sophisticated. Send yourself test messages in each of the major email clients and tweak it until it gets though. This will help you figure out the root of your problem.

1. The Role
of Content
in your
emails
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2. © Copyright 2014. EmailDelivered.com & Marketers Publishing Group, Inc.
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The Role of Content In
Your Email Campaigns
The primary factor in inbox placement is CONTENT! And it’s not enough to simply “mask”
trigger words or get a low “spam score” in your email software when you test against
spam filters.
Most of those are simply checking against databases that review keywords, not scanning
the emails in the same manner that the ISPs do. And as you’ve probably guessed, the
ISPs are much more sophisticated.
So... assuming that everything else is in place, then you’ll want to carefully look at your
content and how that’s playing into your deliverability, specifically inbox placement.
Here are a handful of things to look at that could be impacting delivery rates, and more
specifically, inbox placement:
1. Links in your email messages
(Keep in mind, it’s not always enough to just use a link tracker to
mask the links. Not only can ISPs see past that tracking link,
but there are also blacklists, such as Barracuda, that are
actually clicking through all of the links in a message to
see the intent of the messages).
NOTE: This includes links to images in your messages, if
you’re using HTML.
2. NUMBER of links in your messages.
We were troubleshooting for someone a few weeks back
and they were trying to figure out why they were going to
the spam folders... Well, they had 18 (yes, EIGHTEEN) links
going to the offer. This falls under the “looks and feels like
spam to the ISPs”. This is almost, if not equally, as bad as the one liner emails that say “To
find out the secret to [fill in the blank], click here” with nothing else in the email message!
3. Overall Content
I had a prospect contact me this week to ask what we could do to help him get out of the
spam folder. After reading his content, it was clear that nobody could really help him with
his existing content. He needs to rework the messaging in order to fix his problem. PERI-
OD. (It was borderline pornographic, and by his complaints, was not what his audience
expected to see either.)

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4. HTML content and formatting.
Just as your webpages show up differently in different browswers,
your HTML emails show up differently in different clients. Not to
mention, if there are any code errors that the ISPs don’t want to
see, you’ll get dinged on that too.
The best thing to do is send yourself a test message in each of
the major email clients and massage the content until it gets to
the inbox. Keep in mind, that different ISPs also weight the qual-
ity of “mailboxes” as well as the data going into it (so it’s best to
use mailboxes that are actually actively being used!)
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ABOUT the author
Heather Seitz is the co-founder, and Marketing Director at EmailDelivered, an email
deliverability management and consulting company based in Austin, Texas. Their sole
focus is on getting your emails delivered!
Heather has worked with top online business owners and marketers around the world to
help solve delivery problems and improve the results from their email programs.