Email marketing is a critical component to any holiday campaign. Whether you’re delivering coupons to your customers, alerting them to your holiday hours, or giving them product recommendations with a gift guide, well-planned emails are valuable to you and your audience.

Even the best-laid plans, though, often go awry.

You may be surprised to find that some of your emails aren’t even landing in your customers’ inboxes this holiday season. Instead, they are getting caught in the ever-tightening mesh of spam filters. At this point, we all know that words like “free” and “buy” are common spam keywords that can get you sent to the spam folder wasteland. Astoundingly, even “visit our website” can get you flagged as being needy, shady, or manipulative, by spam filter standards.

To help you make the most of this critical Q4 conversion period, we’ve put together a list of common, seemingly innocuous phrases that we inadvertently lean on in our email marketing that may actually be working against us this holiday shopping season. Check it out:

Are any of these phrases in your holiday marketing campaigns? Some spam keywords and phrases trigger spam filters without fail, while others can be passable on occasion. There is no hard and fast list of spam phrases to avoid to ensure total deliverability, but with a little research and strategic editing to your email copy, you can make the valuable connections with your customers that we all look forward to this time of year!