We’ve all seen movies about professional good guys who dirty up their souls by getting into the minds of horrible people in order to figure out when and where they’ll strike next. The funny thing is, this sort of approach can work well for you on many levels of your personal and business life. It can even help you to avoid having your email marketing campaigns falsely labeled as spam. Not by cracking the mind of a sociopath, mind you, but by crawling into the mind of the average email spam filter.

Why would you want to do this? You’ve certainly done nothing wrong. You’ve taken the necessary measures to dot your i’s and cross your t’s, and everyone on your mailing list has opted in—so why worry that your message will get snagged by an online spam filter?

Well, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles and there’s not much you can do about it. It’s been said that anywhere from 10 to 20 percent of your messages will probably not make it to their destination, directly as a result of you erroneously being identified as a spammer. And so it pays to walk the extremely straight and particularly narrow. How? By putting on your “spam-colored-lenses” when you proofread your marketing messages. Look for and remove the following:

• Any text in all caps. Not so much as a single word. This means avoiding anagrams like USA and opting instead to say either America or the United States, for example.
• Leave out exclamation points. Better to come off unenthusiastic than to not have your email get there at all.
• Stick to plain text messages with black lettering on white background. Don’t get fancy—get delivered.