The other day I was speaking to a client about implementing an email strategy for her business. While there are plenty of books and articles about email marketing, I will not attempt to rehash these topics here. However, she had many questions that necessitated a few lessons about some of the less discussed nuances related to email marketing that I will try to cover here.
Contact Ownership
When you have a person’s email address, you own it. When you write an email and you have a POP email account, your emails are stored on your system and not in their cloud. Nobody can take away the email addresses you have accumulated or the history of the emails that you created.
This is quite different than having a fan or follower on a social media platform like Facebook, or LinkedIn. Fans and followers belong to the platform, not you. If the social media platform chooses, they can delete your account and all of your history. Consider what happened to Donald Trump’s social media accounts as well as many others in January 2021.
Algorithms
When you create an email campaign you can send the message to everyone or to just a segment of your entire list that is appropriate for your message. The decision of who will be presented with your message is yours and yours alone.
When you create a post that you share on social media, the platform, such as Facebook, uses algorithms to determine who will see your message. For example, you may have 1,000 Facebook fans but not everyone will see your message. Facebook will determine which fans will see your message based on their algorithms, not you.
Moreover, the social media algorithms used to determine who will see your post are well guarded and are always changing. What worked yesterday may not work today or tomorrow. To be effective in social media requires you to stay current with and constantly evaluate your processes. Email by contrast, is very stable and not ruled by changing algorithms.
Email Inbox Providers Are Not Equal
Email inbox provides such as Gmail, AOL, Outlook, etc., do not treat all emails the same. For example, Gmail will render emails with HTML content different from Outlook. Some will display embedded images and or video while others may not. Each inbox provider displays an email’s content differently.
Not only should you check to see how your emails will appear based on different inbox providers, but due to the increasing number of people checking emails on mobile devices and tablets, you should be sure to understand how your emails will be displayed based on different devices. This is where email analytics can help you uncover issues.
While it may be a daunting effort to verify how your email will appear on each inbox provider, I think there is an easy solution – Keep It Simple.
When you receive an email from a friend, the email is not formatted in HTML nor does it usually contain images or video. Therefore while email tools like ConstantContact and MailChimp have the ability to create flashy and good-looking emails to make them look like landing pages (which I acknowledge is tempting to use), most recipients will associate image/video intensive HTML formatted emails as unsolicited emails. So, I recommend to clients to just keep it simple and appear to be friendlier by just sticking to plain text email messages.
Buying Email Lists
In a nutshell, don’t buy lists. It may seem like a short-cut to buy a targeted list, but it is fraught with potential issues.
First and foremost, many email marketing software tools like ConstantContact and MailChimp will not let you use a list that you purchased for good reason. The reason is related to Anti-SPAM rules.
Many small businesses however, continue to buy email lists and import them or search for email addresses on websites and manually add them to their email lists.
When a person receives an unsolicited email, some will likely report them as spam. If the receiver labels your email as spam because they did not subscribe/enroll to your list, the sender’s reputation on the email inbox platform will be tarnished. The issue is that it only takes a few people to click on the spam message button to get the sender’s email address blacklisted.
If the email inbox provider lists the sender’s email as coming from a spammer, then any other email recipients on that platform will not see the messages. For example, if several persons on your email list use the Gmail inbox provider and a few Gmail recipients label your message as spam, your email will be bounced and your sender email address blacklisted. Being blacklisted means that other clients with a Gmail address that love your stuff will no longer see any emails that you send because the inbox provider, Gmail, in this case, considers what you send as spam.
If you think you can just create a lot of new email address when your email address is blacklisted, think again. In your email is an unseen header that contains the sender’s IP-address that tracks the address to its source. Here is a link to learn more about what is contained in an email header. Once an email address is identified as a spammer, the inbox provider will reject all emails from the same source. Additionally, offenders may be added to the Domain Name System Blacklist and all messages from the IP address will be rejected by all inbox providers that use this list.
Additionally, mail services providers will sometimes create spam traps. Spam traps are bogus emails that are often captured by list generators. If discovered by an inbox provider, they indicate that the sender bought an email list and the sender can be labeled as a spammer and blacklisted. This is especially true when you buy a low-cost email list.
So in the end, while buying a targeted email list may be a tempting short-cut, just don’t.
Bounced Emails
There are soft bounces and hard bounces.
A soft bounce is generally related to a single email message or a single email address. If a recipient’s email folder is full it will generate a soft bounce. Think of soft bounces as temporary issues.
A hard bounce is where the sender’s emails are permanently rejected. A hard bounce may be due to a recipient’s email address not being recognized. This could be due to a simple typo when manually entering the email address, as I often do. A hard bounce can also occur when the email domain no longer exists, or where the recipient leaves the company and their email address is deleted. If a single user defines your email address as spam in their inbox provider, the person will no longer see your emails and it will produce a hard bounce, but your email address will not be blacklisted unless several more list your message as spam.
For more information on bounces, HubSpot Academy has a great list of examples of soft and hard bounces.
Open Rate and Sender Reputation
Inbox providers keep score. They use a variety of factors to assign a sender reputation score. If your sender reputation drops below a defined threshold, your email can be sent directly to the recipient’s spam folder or rejected altogether. Obvious spamming activity negatively affects a sender’s reputation but so too does open rates.
If your emails have very low open rates, the inbox provider may unlist you as well. Moreover, many email marketing software tools like MailChimp charge the sender based on the total number of email addresses they have.
Therefore having a clean list with only recipients that have a history of opening your emails is a good practice. Email marketing software tools like MailChimp assign a “Contact Rating” from one to five stars to rate the quality of each email address in your list. It is a good idea to segment your email list and periodically target low-quality contacts with a final email to either encourage them to engage with your content or purge/unsubscribe them from your list. Keeping a clean email list will help in maintaining a good sender reputation so you can achieve higher delivery rates.
Inbox Screening
Assuming an email makes it through to the receiver’s inbox, you need to understand how recipients who receive more emails then they care to read each day, use mental short-cuts to determine which emails are worth their time to open and read.
Studies have shown that most email recipients look first at who the email is coming from. If the receiver recognizes the name of the sender or the sender’s name creates a degree of mystery or curiosity the sender will open the email. Therefore, it is important to consider what the recipient will see in the “To:” field of the email. If the receiver does not recognize the sender, they may not go through the effort to list you as spam but they certainly will not prioritize opening the email.
After the sender’s name, the next filtering field is the subject line. Much has been written about the value of crafting a captivating subject line to encourage recipients to open the email. I like to use isitwp.com’s free headline analyzer tool as it reviews my draft headlines for common, uncommon, emotional, and power words, as well as recommended word and character counts. Afterwards, it gives me a score so I can compare several versions of my headline to see which ones have the best structure, grammar, and readability.
While email marketing software tools may allow you 150 characters for a subject line, some email inbox providers display only the first 40 characters. So try to keep your subject lines short or at least front-end load the first 40 characters of your subject line with compelling content.
Moreover, some inbox providers also allow you to double the number of characters you can use by also displaying Preview Text. Think of preview text as an additional piece of real estate to influence a recipient to open your email.
