Everyone wants their emails to get opened more, but the first step is to improve your email deliverability. What does that even mean? Getting your email to even show up in your prospect or customers inbox!
There’s a ton of technical stuff you should do, but there’s also a few key things you can do that don’t require custom DNS settings, domain authentication, or setting up DMARC.
- Drop the fancy email templates.
First off, stop using HTML template emails. The more HTML in an email the more likely it’s going to get flagged by email services as promotion or even worse spam. Yes I know they’re prettier, and “on-brand”. But which is more important to you, a pretty email that nobody gets, or a more basic email that gets delivered?
If you’ve been following this newsletter or some of my other work, you’ll notice I don’t use a ton of HTML emails. In fact I don’t even use that many images.
- Limit how many images you use.
Yes I know we all like to look at pretty pictures, and they do have their place. But if you can limit the number of images, the better off you’ll be. Many email clients block images by default, so your pretty picture might not even be seen. Then add in the extra bandwidth they use that could impact your emails being delivered.
- Don’t use a bunch of links.
Just like image and html the more links you have in an email, the less likely an email provider is going to let you in the front door. Technically links are HTML so there’s that. But a lot of links in an email is typical of spam or malicious scammers, so it’s just a trust signal to the providers that they might not want to trust you.
- Send from a person, not a role based email address.
If you’re sending your newsletter or other emails from a role based email like info [at] domain [dot] com, many email providers will ding your deliverability score. Not because it’s bad, but it’s just a common spam technique. I also like to set my email display name to something like Nick Berry <> Company Name. Personally I believe, who is sending the email, and if they’re expecting to see your name impacts open rates than subject lines by themself.
- Write better subject lines.
I know I just said the person sending the email impacts open rates more than subject lines alone, but the more emails you can get opened, the higher your trust worthiness with email providers. Personally I really like using song titles, or something based on song titles. Especially in cold or marketing emails.
- Write your emails to get replies.
Something I realized very early into my email marketing career was the more people that replied to emails, the better my deliverability seemed. As I dug in and did more research I found that low or no replies doesn’t hurt your email deliverability, but having a higher reply rate does increase deliverability.
Also if you can get them to reply, and if they’re using gmail or google workspace you’re more likely to be in their main inbox, not the promotions tab!
There are a ton of technical things you need to do to improve deliverability, but following these 6 tips will also help. And if your emails aren’t getting delivered, they definitely aren’t getting opened!