Free email marketing and bulk email marketing are especially tricky modes of advertising. On the one hand there is pressure to ensure that the prospective customer is dazzled by what he or she sees but, on the other hand, is the pressure to ensure that the mail isn’t loud enough to be noticed by a spam filter. This is indeed a tight rope walk but not one that cannot be resolved. If you look at the real world of bulk email marketing, you will notice that some of the most trusted bulk email marketers are those with the most sober mails, from a design perspective. Banks are a classic example. Probably the only thing garish and gaudy about a bank’s email design format is the branding colors themselves. Apart from this, everything has a nice and neat, professional look.

The first design tip that you must follow is to limit the amount of text that you use. This serves two purposes: the first being that the less the text, the less available for a spam filter to check and, second, the more space for images – and images speak a thousand words. This also allows you to make more redirects to your main site and use tools like links in your emails.

The next design tip for your free email marketing campaign relates to the use of HTML. Anybody with a technical background will tell you that the more you encode, the easier it is for other software to read those tags and block them as spam. This is especially true when you use too much bold, capitalization, and colors in an email. Therefore, stick to internet etiquette, use colors that are not too bright, try and stick to one color only.

The third design tip is the use of imagery. Some spam filters are designed to scan images for hues that correspond to human skin color. This was specifically designed to filter out pornographic images but this can also affect other advertising that requires showing skin like deodorant ads, for example. Therefore, try to not use imagery of humans as this can be a trigger point.

The last and most interesting point is widening your scope of multimedia use in an email. This is a contentious argument because some would say that most email clients block images and video from displaying. However, the counter argument could be that, if this occurs, then you need to modify any written words you have to encourage a person to allow the display of images. The other argument is that assuming that spammers are not the prime focus of a mail user, those mails that do end up meeting the eyes of the user are going to be seen anyway and investigated further, so therefore it makes sense to have multimedia. In either case, make your decision based on the consequences of using multimedia. One guideline would be to use this option only when mailing users of a webmail domain.