Email metrics give marketers quite a bit of visibility into their campaigns, but there’s one thing that your analytics program can’t tell you: whether your delivered email ended up in the inbox or the spam box. This is even more of an issue for b2b marketers, said Janine Popick, CEO and co-founder of email service provider VerticalResponse. “You can do everything in your power to get that email delivered—feedback loops, for example—but that’s only going to work for Gmail or AOL,” she said. “Getting into a corporate setting requires more work since an email administrator’s job is to protect his or her employees’ time.”

Those administrators use commercial spam filters and create all-encompassing policies that flag commercial email, which is why, Popick said, it’s important for email marketers to avoid looking too much like spam. Popick provided these five tips to help you get your messages past the business gatekeepers and have them delivered directly into the inbox.

1. Change your salutation. We’ve heard it for years: Personalize whenever possible. But there’s a big difference between sending content that’s related to a recent purchase and simply personalizing an email with a “Dear Name.” “[Commercial email filter] SpamAssassin can flag an email with ‘Dear’ as a piece of spam,” Popick said. “We suggest forgoing the salutation completely.”
2. Get rid of buzz and bulleted lists. Spam filters also look for specific formatting and language that screams spam. A bulleted list, Popick said, is the lazy man’s way to email. Likewise, using too many industry buzzwords can make your helpful message seem like it’s a solicitation. Write emails as you would speak to someone, she said.
3. Check your links. It should go without saying that links should be live and correct. Spam filters pick up on broken or inactive links. However, you also should also look at the suffixes you’re using in your links, she said. Links ending in “.php,” a type of HTML scripting language, are often a red flag for spam filters. Avoid them when possible, Popick said. “You’ll need to talk to your webmaster, but it’s worth the extra effort if your email gets through.”
4. Keep lists—and campaigns—small. When large batches of emails are sent to the same domain at the same time, it looks like a mass mailing and often doesn’t get through. “Break your list up into smaller chunks, and send them out over the course of a day so you’re not sending out one list of 5,000 but five lists of 1,000,” Popick said. “If you’ve got a big list going out, Gmail or Yahoo can look at reputation, but a corporate email system administrator isn’t always going to rely on reputation services as the foundation for his or her email rules.”
5. Get professional help. Some marketers still use Microsoft Word’s HTML editing function to create their HTML-based emails. This is a big mistake unless your ESP has a “Paste from Word” conversion tool, Popick said. “It’s sloppy,” she said. “When you paste HTML from Word sometimes the code includes funky characters, which is definitely going to get your message flagged as spam.”