Read on to learn the basics of how to keep your email blasts from landing in junk folders.

Like most businesses, law firms have increased the amount of email we send to clients and prospective clients. We've learned a lot of lessons over the years about how to increase readership and clickthrough rates.

One of the most important lessons learned, however, is how to ensure we create email that won't be seen as spam by mail filters. Let's face it - getting through the door is more than half the battle.

Here are a few best practices on how to avoid being marked as spam:

• Don't purchase email lists. Especially with the introduction of GDPR, which requires each European recipient's consent before you contact them via email. Purchased or rented lists don't have any of that consent.
• Use an email service (such as MailChimp, Vuture, Marketo) that does the up-front work of scrubbing your email address list to ensure you won't be sending to unsubscribed contacts.
• Do a reputation audit on a regular basis to see how your emails are viewed by the monitoring services. Typically your email service offers this as one of their tools, but you can try Barracuda Networks for a regulatory compliance audit or use Cisco Talos for a reputation lookup.
• Try an email quality check service such as Litmus - they have testing services to enable you to see, ahead of sending, how well your email will fare against various spam filters.
• Register your domain with the Network Abuse Clearinghouse.
• Watch your wording - HubSpot put out an updated list of "trigger" words that spam filters consider particularly spammy, especially when used in your subject line.
• Control your email pixel width. If your email is wider than 650 pixels, you are forcing many readers to scroll horizontally to read your content. This is sloppy and doesn't reflect well on your organization.