The most persuasive email ever written will not produce sales if it doesn’t hit the inboxes of your list.
To ensure you hit more inboxes, you need to do 3 primary things: setup your host/domain, maintain professional standards, and connect with your subscribers.
If you do everything mentioned in this post, you’ll be setup to enjoy extra sales and income from the work you put in.
Setup Your Host and Domain.
The first step to increasing your email deliverability is to ensure that Email Service Providers (ESPs) see you as a legitimate email sender.
The security you have over at your web host matters. Things like long, difficult to decipher passwords, firewalls, and other security traps can help, but that only prevents hacking.
Your web host’s control panel has some simple to implement things that will help the ESPs recognize your authority.
DKIM, SPF, and DMARC records.
Each of these records serve the purpose of proving your identity. If you can prove your identity, you’ll raise the level of trust the different ESPs have for your domain and your emails.
SPF stands for “Sender Policy Framework” and DKIM stands for “Domain Keys Identified Mail”, both records are mandatory for anyone sending emails with the desire to have them land in the inboxes you’re sending to. The video below shows how to set it up:
DMARC stands for “Domain-based Message Authentication”, this authentication system just recently came out and it adds more reliability your sending email address. This blog post shows how to set one up.
Google Postmaster
GooglePostmaster is an easy way to get more of your emails into Gmail inboxes. Follow the process at this link and get your domains listed and verified.
SenderScore
SenderScore is a credit score for your email address. It ranges from 0 to 100 and the higher the score, the higher the likelihood of your emails landing in inboxes you send them to. It changes every day, but don’t check it that often. Taking a look once a week, or even once a month is enough.
Once you have all of this setup, check to make sure you got it all setup right at Mail Tester.
Maintain Professional Standards
Always send from the same domain.
I’ve heard different advice from a few different “email experts”, but what I’ve learned over time is that the single best thing you can do for your business is to email from the same email address and never change it.
If you’ve taken all of the steps listed above, you should have no issue with reaching your subscribers. Plus, it’s better for your domain reputation to stick to a single email. Your subscribers will know your email when they see it and (hopefully) look forward to receiving your messages.
Use an Autoresponder service.
There are dozens of different ways to manage your email list and a few of them are “self hosted”. To “self host” your email list, you have to setup autoresponder software on your host. It’s a terrible idea.
Autoresponder services have relationships with ESPs that you will never be able to reproduce as a small emailer. Take advantage of their relationships.
While some autoresponders can get tracking domains flagged as spam, it’s rare. More importantly, the Autoresponder service will be able to fix something like that a lot faster than you would if you got flagged.
It may cost more, but if your email list is a source of income, you have to use an Autoresponder service. Which service you use doesn’t matter as long as it’s an active company that knows what they’re doing.
Remove dormant email addresses.
Would you give someone a room in your house for free? If someone isn’t opening your emails, yet stays on your list, you’re allowing them to cost you money and reduce your deliverability.
ESPs measure the value of your emails based on how many of their users open them. If someone hasn’t opened an email you’ve sent after a month or two, boot them off your list.
Connect With Your Subscribers
Get your emails opened.
A little bit of copywriting skill goes a long way to get your subscribers to open your emails.
If you need ideas for headlines, you can get help from this post we put together awhile ago.
A trick I’ve successfully used in the past is to use an ASCII character in my headline. It’s not something you should use every time you send an email, but it’s worth trying to see if it boosts your open rates. Just copy and paste one of the characters into your headline and see how it does for you.
Personalization helps open rates in most situations. If you’ve collected the first names of your subscribers, use it.
Most importantly, your headline has to explain in a few words why your email is going to matter to your subscriber. Always come up with headlines that convey the end result you’ll be providing to those that read your emails.
Get your subscribers to reply.
Any interaction with your messages makes you look good to ESPs. Make sure you email from an address you actively monitor and ask a question your readers will want to answer.
The more that respond, the better you look.
Use your data to improve.
Every autoresponder service gives you data based upon each email you send. Every few weeks, you should be looking through your data to see what resonated most with your list.
Whatever they responded to shows exactly how to get them to respond again. Higher response equals more sales revenue in your pocket.
To take your understanding beyond the basic reporting you get from your autoresponder service, take a look at Autoresponder Analytics.
Easy Mode List Building
If you follow everything above, your list will perform twice as well as someone that doesn’t put each of those things into place.
When you’re ready to increase the size of your list, TrafficForMe is ready and willing to help with our amazing traffic.
Leave a Reply