5 email delivery tips you must know even if you haven’t got an email list yet

If you’re running an email marking campaign, multiple campaigns or even building a list and delivering value to that list. You are 100% going to want your emails to reach their destination. I mean that’s obvious right?

First things first though. If you are one of those people who is watching their open rates with like a hawk and swapping subject fields like crazy trying to find the best one and changing up body copy also. I’m here to tell you to just relax for a second.

Whilst the subject line could be a problem and so could the email body. It could also be that your emails just aren’t getting to where you want them to be.

 So let’s dive in and discuss a few ways to give those emails the best chance of reaching your clients.

Don’t let people sign up to your list with alias email addresses or fake ones.

 So, first tip is just for those who have their own lists. When you ask a customer to sign up either from a pop up or a landing page after they get your freebie. Don’t let ones in that appear to be fake or aliases.

Why?

This is going to screw with your open rates and deliverability. Sending regular emails out to someone who isn’t there and has no intention of reading is not what you want. My advice. If you notice one appear in your CRM boot it straight away. Put a disclaimer on your sign up that makes this clear. The warning up front ensures there can be no kick back at all to your rule. Any complaint can be directed to the policy, and you have the power to let them in with a real address or ban them FOREVER! If you want to get a little drunk on power. It’s your list after all.

If you don’t fancy purging your list that early on then this next tip is for you….

Use a double opt in

This is the perfect way to prevent some of the above happening. Think of it as the bouncer to your email list. Before you get in you must prove you are who you say you are.

This is a relatively easy thing to and most decent CRM’s will have options to select a double opt in. The actual mechanics are straight forward. A subscriber signs up to your list by inputting an email. They are sent an email then asking to confirm the email address before they are given access to the list. Really simple and effective for properly gathering good subscribers.

Get on their email whitelist

So a really good way to ensure you get emails delivered is to get on to the customer whitelist. What is a whitelist I hear you say?

The whitelist is the opposite of the blacklist. The blacklist being where customers put those email addresses they don’t want to hear from. So, it’s a list where they put email addresses that they do want to see.

To get here you could just flat out ask the customer to do it. So in a welcome email you might put a note in there that reads,

“hey, don’t forget to whitelist this email address so you don’t miss any of our valuable emails”.

As we are trying to make the customer do something here you have to expect that some just won’t do it. Netflix might be on in the background and you’re probably going to lose that battle every time.

So how else can we get on that whitelist?

Invite a reply. Ask them a question and say you would love to hear from them, and you will reply to them. For some businesses a weekly Q&A could work well. Invite questions and then pick the best ones and once week share them with your list and answer them.

Doing a weekly Q&A can help to achieve this next tip which is.

Email regularly

Try and aim for everyday if you can. There’s plenty of ways you can come up with an email every day and provide value. Value doesn’t always have to be giving away something for free as well. There are other ways you can provide value to your audience. So try to commit to emailing often and this will help stop you being marked as spam.

A few technical things

On a technical front there are a couple of things you can do. The first one is to not use too many images in your emails. If you can don’t use any. Email clients don’t like and if there isn’t much copy then it might well flag the email as spam.

The second is links. Too many links in an email will also have the same effect as images and get you sent straight to the spam. Try use just one and make it a call to action and invite the reader to click but no biggie if they don’t. We don’t want to hard sell in emails.

The last technical advice is a bit of homework for you. There’s such a thing called spf and dkim. These two things can play a part in your email marketing deliverability. However, they are quite technical and as a copy writer I don’t profess to know and awful lot about them. In my opinion I wouldn’t worry too much about these and focus on hitting all the other points and you should be fine.

That’s a wrap on my email marketing deliverability tips. If you liked the blog let me know at info@zappycopy.com and of course if you wish to have a quick chat regards your own email marketing, I’m here for that also.

Here’s to smashing those goals

Jon