Prevent deliverability issues, such as being caught in spam filters, prior to sending marketing emails.
Add DKIM and SPF records to your domain name’s DNS to verify your email domain.
You can find the DKIM and SPF records by checking your email service provider such as G Suite, Microsoft, GoDaddy etc.
Check whether the platform you are planning to use for marketing emails requires you to add any extra records to your DNS.
Optionally, you can add a DMARC record to your DNS for extra protection.
For newly created email addresses - less than a week old - manually send a few emails every day for a couple of weeks.
Email providers flag brand-new email addresses-send and receive regular emails with the new email account for at least a month.
Send these emails from the account inbox without any automation involved - as you would to a friend or colleague. Make sure to send emails to a variety of email address types like personal Gmail accounts and business accounts.
In your marketing email templates, include a clear unsubscribe link and a description of why the recipient is receiving the email.
For example, “You’re receiving this email because you signed up on [website].”
Add your business address to your email templates.
There are anti-spam laws in some countries that require a physical address to be included in emails. Therefore, it’s a good practice to add them for your email templates.
Use an email deliverability testing tool like Mail Tester before your email campaign to ensure your emails are delivering properly and fix any critical errors if needed.
Clean up your email database to avoid hard bounces that can damage your email/domain reputation.
Hey @wlaschmidt . Couple of questions before i can get better advice
how many links did you end up using?
Was the email domain warmed up?
Where the emails blasted or sent out bit by bit?
Did you do any personalisation or spam word analysis?
1-We’re averaging about 4 links per email (3 of which are our social media linked icons at the bottom of the email) I’d be more than willing to strongly suggest less, at any CXL professional’s guidance.
2-Yes, we’ve been using the email domain for a while. But I noticed that we somehow got placed on SORBS blacklist
Overall, I think our sender score should be pretty strong, but we really need this email to land in the gmail inboxes to make this campaign a success.
We’re a bootstrapped English as a Second language SaaS app that can eventually branch out to the world, but we have to start in Japan. https://gamerize-dictionary.com
@hesh_fekry
Thank you very much, Hesh! Much appreciated. I’ve set up an A/B test with 3 links removed each day. The series will be dripped out to smaller segments over an 8-day period, so I’m guessing we’ll be all right on that front.
First and most importantly: the Promotions tab IS the inbox. Most of our brands’ emails are in fact promotions, so Promotions is the correct tab. Don’t worry: users are now fully used to the Promotions tab and on the whole, click-through rates are the same as before the separation of the Primary and Promotions tab.
However, your SORBS Blacklist may be getting you filtered to the spam folder moreso than just Promotions tab of the inbox which is the more worrying thing. Are you tracking your inbox placement through a tool like Validity’s Everest and noticing poor placement? Or were you just asking categorically?
If your emails are not promotional and truly belong in the Inbox, my recommendation is more around dialing back images/styling than links. (Make it look more like a person-to-person email. Also, Hesh’s recommendation to check for spammy words is a smart one! What is the content of these 5 drip emails? I’m assuming it’s promotional, but may be misunderstanding!
RE: DMARC, most brands that aren’t banks haven’t bothered with this yet, but you could certainly try it. More important is that you have SPF and DKIM setup correctly. What email platform are you using? Did they work with you to validate the DNS records on your sending domain/subdomain?
Thanks for diving into the Playbook and asking questions!
The emails are definitely promotional.