Improving email deliverability

Ultimately what matters with email marketing is the results. Since the point is to convert a reader into a subscriber and into a customer, we have to make sure there are no leaks in our funnel.

That means every step needs to work perfectly:

If your emails aren't even reaching the inbox of your subscribers, the whole system collapses.

So if you haven't spent any time addressing this, it's time to start right now.

In this lesson I want to focus on getting your emails delivered, opened, and your offers clicked.

There are two responsible parties involved in getting emails into the inbox, your email marketing provider and you.

Your email marketing provider handles some of the workload to help with getting your emails into the inbox.

They handle the IP addresses, sending domains, and link tracking domains to make sure they have a high reputation score.

They also stay on top of things like:

This is why it's important to choose an email marketing provider that stays on top of these issues.

Personally, I use and recommend ConvertKit. After making the switch from Mailchimp I noticed an increase in my open rates.

I attribute this to the fact that ConvertKit attracts bloggers, coaches, and creators - not affiliate marketers who purchase huge email lists.

In short, you need a high sender reputation to get your emails into the inbox every single time.

To get a high sender reputation score you need to send positive signals and avoid negative ones.

Positive signals are opens, clicks, and replies.

Negative signals are unopened emails or being marked as spam.

Here's a few ways to get get these positive signals and avoid the negative ones.

Ask subscribers on the thank you page to whitelist your email address or add you to their contacts list.

You can also ask subscribers to do this in the welcome email / incentive email / opt-in confirmation email.

This act alone will make sure your emails always end up in the inbox of these subscribers and never in the spam folder.

Certain words can trigger a spam filter to think you're a spammer. Avoid these trigger words:

Spammers are known to send emails with nothing but images. The idea being that they won't include any spam-triggering words, yet they'll still get their message across.

So, skip the fancy email templates and stick to plain text emails. After all, it's what you say that matters to your audience.

It's a good practice to talk with your audience, not at them.

If you want an engaged email list, ask for engagement!

Pose a question at the end of your emails and ask for replies. Just a simple question is all that's needed to get a little engagement and boost your sender reputation score.

For example:

I've learned that if you ask subscribers to do one thing, they'll do it. But if you ask them to do 4 things, they'll do none!

This is why you should only include one link per email.

Don't randomly link words or include links near the top of the email.

Just add one link to the bottom of the email and ask them to click it.

To keep your sender reputation score high, you need to have an active engaged list who regularly opens your emails.

This means you need to periodically go into your email marketing provider and remove people who don't open your emails.

It used to bug me so much to unsubscribe people for fear that I was losing a potential customer.

But if these people aren't even opening your emails, they're not your customers and they are actually causing harm.

Depending on your email marketing provider, you can either search for users who haven't opened the last [X] emails or haven't opened emails the last [X] weeks.

ConvertKit automatically finds cold subscribers for you, who they define as anyone who hasn't opened or clicked an email in the last 90 days.

You can either delete them in bulk at this point - but it's much better to send cold subscribers one last email to give them a final chance to stay on your list before you delete them.

Here's how to do this in ConvertKit.

First, find your cold subscribers and tag them as COLD.

Then, go to Automations > Rules and create a rule that says if the subscriber clicks a specific link the COLD tag will be removed.

The last step is sending a broadcast email to everyone with the COLD tag.

Make sure to use the link trigger you created in the previous step as your link.

Then send the email and wait a few days before you delete anyone who still has the COLD tag.

Here's a template you can use: