Outlook junk folders are dangerous territory for email marketers. Make one tiny mistake in your HTML, and you can unwittingly cut your broadcast response rates by 25% or more. And yet it doesn't need to be this way...and you don't need a high-end email service provider to solve it for you. Here's how:

1. Get a copy of Outlook 2003 (don't go to 2007 if you don't have to).
2. Set your "Junk Folder Rules" to "High". This is the default for anyone installing it for the first time. Assume that's the minimum bar you need to achieve.
3. Do NOT whitelist your broadcasting "from" address...just let the emails come into your inbox with the highest chance of getting caught as possible.
4. Send yourself a "test" before every broadcast, and check to make sure it arrives in the inbox.
5. If it's in the junk folder, here are some likely culprits, edit it, and resend:

• spam words/phrases (duh) such as "40% off", "sale", "discount", etc. etc.
• focus on the subject line and try to alter it (shorter, alternative wording, punctuation)
• look for odd url's and links (we find that URLs are often the culprit):
  - don't use url's with numbers in them
  - use full domains (http://www.this.com = good, http://this.com = bad)
  - try to use only ONE url domain. Lots of different links to different sites can be a problem
  - links that do not end in a file extension (e.g. ".htm", ".asp" are better than
  http://www.this.com/asdf342 )
• emails that have a lot of images, or have a large single image can get caught. The onslaught of image-spam within the last year is to thank for that (image-spam is where the sender hides their message in an image so as to get around spam-filters).

It's not that hard, frankly, yet I just went to my own junk folder in Outlook, and within the last two hours I have emails from Marketing Sherpa, MarketingProfs, Saks, and Williams-Sonoma - all sitting innocently next to Cialis offers, Webcam sites, and who-knows-what from China. Imagine that: two of the top online advisors of email-best-practices have their emails regularly go into Outlook junk folders. Say what?

Outlook's junk folder algorythm is pretty darned good, but it does catch the occasional email I really want to read. Personally, I scan and delete my junk folder inventory 3-4 times/day. Microsoft updates the Outlook junk-filter rules all the time (approx once every 3-4 weeks), and there's no way to legitimately reverse engineer it...which means the marketer just has to be smart...and it only takes 2 minutes to conduct this free self-test. We often focus so much attention on AOL, Yahoo and others that we forget that Outlook represents between 30 and 65% of your email list, on average!

One final reason to take the time to fix this: Outlook's junk-folder system will convert your message to text, and even (at times) disable all the links...which is highly upsetting to any VP of Marketing who prides themselves on quality branding. I encourage you to peruse your own junk folder and see what I mean - it's not pretty. If most consumers are like me, when I see a big brand name in the junk folder I actually start to second-guess the quality of that company as well.