Getting your emails into the inboxes of your customers is critical. There's no greater frustration than creating a high-quality email campaign through your email marketing software, only to fail to get it in front of your target audience.

Deliverability is a complex subfield of email marketing. There are many best practices that help email marketers' emails end up in inboxes.

One of the easiest deliverability best practices to follow, however, is avoiding the use of spam words in subject lines and emails. Email spam filters are highly likely to prevent emails with certain phrases from reaching inboxes.

What Types of Words Are Flagged as Spam?

Email spam filters generally look for phrases that indicate an email is unwanted or harmful to the recipient. You should avoid using words that might result in your email being perceived as a:

The Most Common Spam Words

Below, we've listed over 250 common spam words that are likely to trigger email inboxes' spam filters. While not every email that includes these words will be caught in spam filters, it is best to avoid using them when possible.

If you notice that you have a deliverability issue, it's worth searching through your emails to remove any mentions of the words below. If your deliverability improves, you should see an increase in your email open rates.