Correspondence: Sean Duffy, Lead Consultant Emailcenter UK Limited Kingthorn Park Greens NortonTowcester Northants NN12 8BS, UK. Tel: +44 (0)1327 350921; Fax: +44 (0)1327 359502; E-mail: sean.duffy@emailcenteruk.com

¹is Lead Consultant for UK email service provider Emailcenter, who provide email marketing solutions, services and consultancy to UK blue-chip organisations such as P&O Cruises, talkSPORT, National Savings & Investments and Saga. Sean has been working within the email marketing industry since 2002 and is responsible for providing strategic and tactical advice to the Emailcenter client base.

Received 4 June 2007.

Abstract

Getting your email campaigns past spam filters has been a key concern for email marketers for some time. If your email campaign gets classified as spam, the response rate will be a fraction of the potential. On average, around 20 per cent of commercial email is blocked or filtered by Internet Service Providers, which therefore equates to millions in potential revenue lost per annum. The most common question asked by marketers is what do I need to do to ensure that all my emails avoid the junk mail filters. Unfortunately, there is no magic single tool or answer but a whole host of different factors that need to be understood. As the difference between sending email to consumers compared to businesses is significant this paper aims to highlight the key factors ensuring that consumer email marketing campaigns get delivered into the inbox.