Since the beginning of their existence, spam filters have been relying on content analysis to classify the email traffic that they received. This type of analysis is referred to as “Bayesian Filter”. Spam Assassin still heavily uses bayesian filtering (insert picture) and will give a probably out of 100 that your email is indeed spam.
One of the early methods used by a spammer to trick these bayesian filters was to send text as an image in the body of the email, making the content analysis impossible. This has led to the apparition of the text to image ratio (link to explanation), another important metric to consider when writing your content.
Before actually answering the question, a note to make sure both you and I are on the same page. Landing into the promotion is actually landing into the main inbox. In this article, when we say that spam words can land you into spam, we are talking about the actual spam box, not the social / promotion tab on Gmail.
Back to the original question, are spam words really a “thing” and should you care about them?
Yes. Anything present in your email will be scanned and the presence of spammy words. The most frequent spammy words are:
- Money & finance related (cash, winning, dollars, money,…)
- Job opportunities (make money online, a remote job with immediate cash,…)
- Lifestyle-related (fat loss, addiction-related, adult industry, Medical marijuana & legal drugs)
Having a handful of spammy words in your newsletter would reduce the efficiency of it and could even lead you to go to spam.
You can reduce the impact of your spammy word by:
- Running your email copy through spam words checker.
- Doing a pre-send test on a seed list to make sure it lands into the main inbox.
- Keeping a high engagement on your emails. Even adult industry companies can get away with sending pretty graphic and straightforward emails, if their contacts actually want and engage with the email, they will be sent to the main inbox.
One of the areas where your wording will also be very important is for Gmail tabs. Gmail content filter is one of the most advanced, and innocent words that can lead you to sometimes land into the social / promotion tab instead of the main inbox.
Our test suggest that your placement in promotion will depend on:
- Words that can be apparented to promotional offers
- Also the alignment between the content you advertise sending and what you are actually sending (i.e you use notifications@yourdomain.com to send promotion, the spam filter wil not appreciate that and probably route your traffic to promotion).
To be sure where your email lands, we advise you to do seed list testing prior to sending. Your content can then be optimized by iterating through the parts of the email until you get to main inbox.