As email marketing continues to become a key element of any online marketing campaign, it’s important to make sure that your recipients are actually “receiving” your key email messages & promotions.

Spam filters have become increasingly sophisticated, therefore online marketers must adapt to the changing strategies implemented by Spam identification technology. Failure to do so will invariably land your key offers in “Spam” folders.

If you use email marketing to reach “opt-in subscribers”, there’s a number of approaches you can consider if you’re trying to avoid the possibility of your email communications getting tagged as “Spam”.

The first and obvious choice is to perform a “Spam check” inside your auto responder platform. Though this is a good approach, it doesn’t guarantee that your outgoing message won’t be tagged as Spam once it reaches it’s destination.

Here’s a different approach that will enable you to avoid the Spam filters and increase your web branding and retention rates all rolled into one simple strategy. Not only will you avoid the

Spam filters, your “key” email offers will get more exposure and possibly reside on the recipient’s computer much longer.

Let’s assume your email advertisement was lucky enough to escape the “spam police” and it arrives in your recipient’s inbox as planned. When most people open their email, they quickly scan for messages from family, friends and “senders” that are easily recognizable.

These emails are considered “high value” emails. Once the reader addresses all “high value” emails, they’ll quickly scan “subject headers”, to see if anything else “stands out” as a topic of interest.

Let’s further assume that you’ve taken the time to create an “eye catching” subject header that motivates the reader to actually click on your email and open it.

The reader quickly recognizes your email and mentally tags it as “promotional” in nature, a much less “valued” email. This is true, even if they are somewhat interested in your offer.

Let’s further assume that the email pertains to a product or service of interest to the reader. They scan it, and think to themselves…

“This is interesting, I’ll have to visit that web site and learn more about this product/service, WHEN I HAVE TIME”.

Occasionally they’ll click on the link provided to visit your web site, however most email statistical research indicates, more likely than not, they move on to the next email. This is done with good intentions for they assume they will “revisit” your email at a later, more convenient time.

Bottom line, the reader never returns to your email that informs them of your important offer and most often your email is deleted in a few days during a “mass delete” action when the inbox is being “cleaned”.

Here’s one way to make your email offers different and extend the life of your important promotional messages.

1 – Create a promotional email just as you normally would but convert your finished message to a PDF file. This allows you to use color, graphics and additional elements that usually are omitted because they increase the probability of having your email tagged as spam. This approach also gives you more flexibility as far as the creative process is concerned and allows you to be more descriptive about your offer.

Once converted, have the PDF file uploaded to your web-hosting platform.

2 – Create a second email that you will actually send to the subscriber. This email “touches” on the major benefit of your offer but instructs the reader to “click here” for more information. Of course the link should point to the PDF file you just created. This email should be short and to the point. It should also raise curiosity. This is the only thing you want to accomplish with this email.

You’ve just accomplished a couple of key things…

 1 – You’ve shortened the length of your email communication greatly, thus reducing the chances of having your email filtered by the “spam police”.

2 – When the recipient clicks on the link in your short email and the PDF file appears in their browser, if they are interested in your offer they will most likely “SAVE” the PDF to their hard drive. Even if they don’t return to it immediately, it remains on their hard drive and the possibility of a “revisit” to your offer is increased.  They may even forward it to a friend…. Try linking key promotional messages to PDF files for SPAM avoidance and extended “email shelf life”. Email marketing doesn’t look like it’s going away, neither are spam filters.

Develop new strategies for reaching key subscribers and prospects when using email marketing as a promotional tool, you’ll be glad you did.