How To Get Your Affiliate Promotions Delivered (and Not Flagged as Spam)
By Anna Johnson on June 25th, 2009Like most email publishers, we routinely run our emails through a spam filter before we send them out. While this won’t always ensure our emails get through to everyone (due to the different filters used by the various ISPs, email services and recipients alike), it’s some way towards ensuring our emails through to you. But can we do more?
Sure we can. Regularly ‘cleaning’ our list of bounced email addresses, providing an easy means for people to unsubscribe, and only sending people the kinds of emails they’ve signed up for, are all ways we can maximize deliverability.
But it wasn’t until we started seeing certain emails failing to make it through our spam filter that we realized the importance of something else that email marketers – particularly affiliates or those running ads (as we do) – need to address.
It’s this: it’s not just the words you include in your emails that can set off the filters… it’s also the domains (URLs) in those emails.
For example, we sometimes find that our spam filter flags a given issue of Kikabink News because of the domains / URLs used by some of our advertisers. Essentially, such domains have earned a ‘bad’ email reputation and merely including them in our emails would cause our emails to be flagged as spam.
Fortunately, the solution to this is fairly simple: use a redirect link instead of the ‘bad’ domain.
Similarly, as an affiliate marketer you should also avoid using ‘bare’ affiliate links. Instead, I recommend you use a link to one of your own webpages that redirects people to the affiliate offer. (There are also other advantages to doing this, such as being able to track your own clicks and displaying better looking links).
After all, having a list of 5,000, 50,000 or even 500,000 subscribers is not so impressive if you send out a promotion containing a ‘bad’ domain name, and 30 percent of your subscribers don’t get the email.
The bitter irony of this is that it’s often overzealous (spamming) affiliates that bring a given domain name into disrepute. That may be at least one reason I’ve notice more product owners / merchants insist their affiliates use redirect scripts and the like rather than a bare affiliate links.
