Email Marketing Solutions

Land More Of Your Emails In The Inbox, Get Better Engagement From Your List, And Generate More Revenue On A Consistent Basis.

Deliverability is the key to a successful email marketing channel.

It goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyways)… If your emails aren’t landing in the inbox, then they aren’t going to be opened, read, clicked on, or purchased from.

Unfortunately, deliverability can seem fickle and unpredictable at best sometimes.

And while you can check your sender score using third party tools, there’s no other single “deliverability” metric.

That’s because your email deliverability can change from email to email depending on a variety of factors.

So you might have an email on Monday that lands in everyone’s inbox, but then an email on Thursday that ends up in the SPAM folder for some or all of your subscribers.

I’m not going to talk today about all of the deliverability acronyms, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, BIMI, etc.

These are important, but you’re probably using a shared sending domain within your ESP (Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign, etc.) and with a shared sending domain you don’t have to worry as much about SPF or DKIM. 

Instead, we are going to talk about 5 steps that you can use to set up each email for the best success.

Before we get started, make sure you’re subscribed to my email list to receive more tips like this delivered straight to your inbox. You can sign up here.

Let’s dive in…

Step 1 – Set Up A Two-Step Opt-In

Quality over quantity.

I assume that you’re spending money to drive traffic to your website with the goal of converting those site visitors into subscribers.

And you want to see your CPL (cost per lead) as low as possible. So the more people on your list the better. Right?

Wrong.

The success of your email marketing is going to be dependent on the quality of your list. Not the overall size.

So while it might seem counter-productive, setting up a two-step opt-in is the way to go.

If you’re not familiar with a two-step opt-in, it means that after someone enters their email and clicks “sign-up” on your pop-up, they are sent a confirmation email. If they don’t click confirm on that email, they aren’t added to your list.

Yes, this will add extra friction to joining your list. Yes, it may slow list growth. Yes, it may end up increasing your cost per lead.

BUT

It will also ensure that fake emails don’t make it onto your list. Bots aren’t receiving your emails. And your list is filled with actual people who really do want your opt-in offer and are much more likely to engage with your content.

And the more people you have who are engaged on your list, the better your overall deliverability is going to be.

Which leads us to…

Step 2 – Segment Your List And Only Send To Your Engaged Audience

Stop “spraying and praying.”

The days of emailing your entire list and hoping for the best are done.

Email providers (think Gmail, Apple, Outlook, etc.) score your emails based on how many people open, click, and reply.

By the way, replies are one of the strongest indicators of high engagement. If you can send emails occasionally that encourage replies, that’ll do wonders for your deliverability.

The higher the percentage of people who are engaging with your email in some way, the better that email looks in the AI eyes of Gmail, Apple, and Outlook.

I’ve done multiple deep dives into segmentation (and you can also grab my FREE Klaviyo segmentation mini course, link at the bottom) but today I just want to stress the importance of emailing your engaged segment.

If you are really struggling with deliverability, set up a 14-day engaged segment. Or even a 7-day engaged segment and focus on emailing ONLY those subscribers.

But if your deliverability is good, I would recommend that you set up a 30-day and 90-day engaged segment to use for a vast majority of your emails.

The more that you send to these engaged lists, the better your deliverability.

If you need additional support with segmentation, check out my blog post from last week, grab my segmentation mini-course, or shoot me an email at ben@henkenmarketing.com

Step 3 – Make Sure Your Email Has At Least 40% Text

Let’s talk about what’s going into your actual emails.

This section is really going to apply to the ecom brands out there who like to send highly designed, image heavy emails.

More and more, email providers are using AI to “read” emails and determine whether or not they are SPAM.

While this adds another whole layer to the deliverability conversation regarding the words and phrases you use, I’ll suffice it to say that you need to avoid overly spammy language.

BUT… the bigger point of emphasis here is that if your emails are almost entirely images, this looks bad to the bots that are “reading” your emails on behalf of Google and Microsoft.

So what can you do?

First, best practices say that your email should contain at least 40% text. Not including text that is inside your images. Eyeballing it, shooting for a roughly equal amount of text and images is probably a good way to go. 

Next, make sure ALL of your images have descriptive alt text. This is good practice for accessibility of your emails. And the more descriptive your alt text is the better.

Step 4 – Check All Links

Links, links, links.

The success of an email is measured by the click through rate, and you can’t get any clicks if you don’t have any links.

Unfortunately, links can also hurt your deliverability if you’re not careful.

Bad links or broken links are great ways to kill your deliverability.

Make sure to test your emails and check all links to make sure that they lead to the right place and none of the links are broken.

Lastly, the fewer different links you have the better. Ideally you only want one unique link per email. 

But that’s not realistic for most Ecom emails. 

However, you are going to be better off with 2-3 unique links per email than you will with 5-6 (or more) unique links.

A great way to approach this is to go back and review prior campaigns to see where your readers are clicking.

Do you have links that are getting very few clicks? Maybe links in your header or your footer that are static links to your homepage, FAQ, socials, etc? Think about which of these links are necessary and which ones could be eliminated.

Step 5 – Test Your Emails Before Sending Them

Don’t ever send an email out without sending yourself a test email first!

Better yet, send 5 emails to yourself using 5 different inboxes.

This is my breakdown:

• 1 Gmail inbox where I open EVERY email
• 1 Gmail inbox where I open NO emails
• 1 Outlook inbox 
• 1 Apple inbox
• 1 Yahoo inbox

You could add more or change the email providers based on your audience. But you want to make sure that your email is landing in the correct place and that it shows up correctly in the inbox.

Don’t forget to see how your email looks both on desktop and on mobile.

Around 80% of people check their emails on their phones. And while your audience might vary… I’d be willing to bet that a large proportion still uses their phones.

If you’re not optimizing for mobile, you’re going to frustrate a lot of customers. Leading to less engagement and downgrading your deliverability.

Summary

Thanks for reading. Hope you got something today that you can take away and implement immediately.

In case you skimmed down to this section…

Here’s a quick recap of the 5 steps you can take today to improve your deliverability and have more of your emails land in the inbox.

• Step 1 – Set Up A Two-Step Sign-Up Process
• Step 2 – Segment Your List And Only Send To Engaged Audience
• Step 3 – Make Sure Your Email Has At Least 40% Text
• Step 4 – Check All Links
• Step 5 – Test Your Emails Before Sending Them

What Should YOU Do Next?

1. Follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter for daily email tips and what’s working now
2. Leave a like or a comment on this post to let me know what you thought. 
3. If you need an email list manager for your brand or business, send me an email at ben@henkenmarketing.com or fill out this form and I’ll be in touch.
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