8 Quick Fixes To Improve Email Deliverability

Our email inbox is a place of trust and intimacy. Generally when people are getting poor results, they are trying to go for the sale too soon, resulting in a lost trust with their subscribers, and a damaged email sending reputation.

Avoid using spammy words in your emails like 

• Sale
• Free
• Buy now

You get the idea - obviously, there is a time and a place for these words and you are not forbidden from using them, but you want to make sure that value always comes first.

Earn the trust of your new subscribers first by nurturing and giving great value before you start making any sales pitches.

If you come across as preachy to your audience, you are not engaging in conversation. And if we think about what we want for our kids and their friendships, we want a healthy back and forth.

Always invite conversations in your emails. Ask questions, and continue the conversation whenever you get a reply.

This has two huge benefits. First, it builds an honest and deep trust with your audience.

But secondly, it shows GMail that people actually want to receive and engage with your emails, which will help increase your sending reputation and help more messages hit the primary inbox.

The email providers like GMail pick up on little behaviors that your subscribers do to indicate trust. But unfortunately not many people are tech-wizards that know how to appease the email gods. We can fix that!

In your onboarding sequence, you can create a "Whitelist instructions" process. In fact, you can generate the entire instructions for building one here.

So you can build a whitelist instructions page, and direct people to in a few different places:

• Tell new subscribers to whitelist your emails on your thank you page.
• In your onboarding nurture sequence, add subtle reminders on how and why to whitelist emails
• In your email signature

Once your subscribers are trained at whitelisting your emails, two cool things happen.

That specific subscriber will get all your emails going forward. And GMail will begin to associate your email sending address with higher quality content and will allow you to access future subscribers more easily!

Your subscribers likely found you when they were busy and distracted... whether from a Google search, Facebook Ad, or referral from somewhere else online.

We are all busy and if you are not emailing with enough frequency, they will forget all about you, and your next email message will feel like a cold outreach and will get you thrown into the spam box.

Don't go months without emailing your list! I would recommend setting a minimum schedule of one email per week.

This creates a structure for you to follow, as well as something that your subscribers can rely on.

Your emails don't need to be huge 10,000 word ebooks...

Simply check in, give value, ask a question, and let them move on their day!

Life is about balance. You don't want to go quiet for 12 months, but you also don't want to email 12 times per day!

It's good to stay top of mind, but I like to keep respect at the top of everything I do as a digital marketer, so don't overwhelm your audience with too many emails!

I wouldn't advise emailing any more than one email per day.

The truth is that people aren't going to open your emails every day, so getting into a daily email ritual might actually be a good thing (even though it seems overwhelming at first!).

But whenever you start getting complaints over the frequency of your emails, it's probably because:

1. There isn't enough value in the emails you are providing
2. There is too much promotion in every email
3. You are repeating yourself constantly

Then it's time to adjust and pivot.

Sometimes less is more. We all want to impress our subscribers, but adding crazy designs and html coding into our email broadcasts simply screams: "I want to sell to you!!"

I'm a big fan of plain text emails, and studies have shown that plain text emails can positively impact your deliverability.

That doesn't mean you can never include images in your emails (I still do!).

Images can improve relatability, allows you to share personal stories, and more.

But if we think about how our emails look when we are sending them to our co-workers or friends, do we spend tons of time designing them? Nope.

And we should model that behavior when we email our list.

Most email marketing platforms like Convertkit, Mailerlite, and more have their own global email sending service, which manages all the outgoing mail for its users.

But without setting up the proper technical bits in the background, you run a major risk - your emails looking completely fake to the recipient server.

That is because there are invisible digital keys sent with every email, keys such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC (warning - techie bits ahead).

These are essentially secret handshakes between your domain (ie: unbeatabletech.com) and your email provider that links the two and helps build trust with the gatekeepers inside of GMail.

Strangely enough, not all programs require these records to be set up - but you should ALWAYS do it to prevent yourself from going to spam.

Any good email marketing provider will have clear instructions in their onboarding on how to verify and authenticate your domains.

Not all email marketing platforms are created equal. As I said before, these platforms have a global sending reputation and all users are relatively tied to its performance.

This means that if the platform has an excellent reputation, even newer email marketers have a shot of hitting the inbox.

On the other hand, newer email marketing platforms that have been riddled with spammers can decrease the reputation of even the most seasoned of email marketers.

Scary, right?

Some new platforms try to attract new customers with amazing perks like free starter plans or unlimited contacts - which is very attractive. But it can also attract the wrong attention... spammers.

Once spammers have made their way into a new platform, they can cause serious harm for everyone.

Here's how to fix it.

Essentially, the only solution here is to take your email sending reputation into your own hands.

So let's say you love everything about your funnel-building platform, but you are getting terrible deliverability on your emails.

You don't necessarily need to jump ship (although that might be a good option).

You can also take matters in your own hands by routing all your emails using your own email server.