good advice
TrueAccord’s Josie Garcia is a good friend and very savvy deliverability wizard who has helped many senders address inbox woes and data hygiene issues throughout her career. Currently she’s helping a debt collector improve their sending practices — very much a challenging industry from a deliverability perspective. When she told me of her recent successes, I asked her if she would be kind enough to put something together to share with the world, and she was kind enough to do so, leading to today’s post. Take it away, Josie. When a sender’s email program assigns different engagement levels to groups based on specific criteria, naturally, some groups will perform better than others. This can, at times, be challenging. Adding to the challenges, Gmail and Yahoo have recently implemented stricter requirements for bulk senders, set to be enforced in 2024. If you use Gmail Postmaster Tools, and one of your domains
Whenever somebody starts to have deliverability problems, the first question I ask is, “What changed?” Because usually drives a deliverability issue is found through a change in practice, process, platform or PII. Oracle’s Dan Deneweth goes deeper — outlining the thirteen most common warning signs that precipitate deliverability issues. In other words, the answer to “What changed?” is usually one of these baker’s dozen of reasons. To learn what those pitfalls are and how to avoid them, click here to read more.
Well, it’s time to jump on that bandwagon. Just for fun, I decided to ask ChatGPT: What do I do when my email goes to the spam folder? And its response (see below) is not bad. High level guidance, not too detailed. Lacks a little nuance, but it’s not misleading or inaccurate it any major way. Kinda neat. I’ve still got my concerns over AI-driven authoring, relating to sourcing, copyright, and accuracy, but it was a fun toy to play with today.Q: What do I do when my email goes to the spam folder?A: When your email consistently goes to the spam folder, there are several steps you can take to improve its deliverability and increase the chances of it reaching the recipient’s inbox:Check your email content: Make sure your email doesn’t include any spam-like elements. Avoid using excessive capitalization, multiple exclamation marks, misleading subject lines, or suspicious attachments. Craft your
Oracle’s Chad S. White recently shared four fantastic tips on how to maximize your response rate when implementing a double opt-in (aka confirmed opt-in) process. It’s a great way to verify consent (and keep a clean email list), but one of the primary complaints from marketers has always been the low response rate; the percentage of people who will complete the opt-in step is often far less than one hundred. COI/DOI may not be right for every situation (and indeed I just recommend to a client that they consider eliminating a similar process in their site registration because of the challenges they were facing), but it’s still a very good thing to consider in a lot of scenarios. Anyway, enough of my natter, click through to read Chad’s thoughts on the topic.
“Email Unicorn” aka digital marketing professional Michelle Miles doesn’t want you to use the term “blast” when talking about email marketing campaigns. I agree, and her reasoning is sound and you should read it for yourself. (And then you should follow her on Medium!)
Don’t just take my word for it! I like to check in with other smart folks from time to time and see what they have to say about email deliverability. This time around, I recommend checking out this recent article from iPost’s Andrew Kordek, where he shares five solid tips that will allow you to improve your email deliverability. Check it out! It’s very good advice.I first met Andrew back when he worked for daily dealer Groupon, somewhere around a hundred years ago. THAT was a heady time, let me tell you. After a long stint at digital agency Trendline Interactive (which he co-founded), he is now Vice President of Customer Engagement for email service provider iPost, an “Email & Messaging Platform Built for Franchises, Agencies, Associations, Restaurants, Entertainment, Publishing, and Retail.”