Your email marketing efforts will be useless unless your messages are being delivered to your customers’ inboxes. That’s what the black art of email deliverability is all about. Fortunately, you can fix all your deliverability problems by following this handy list of 10 Deliverability Best Practice tips… and by staying in a Holiday Inn Express for a few nights.
- Never send email on a consistent regular schedule. People love suspense. Keep them guessing about when your next email will arrive.
- Never purge your list. Let your ESP bounce bad addresses as many times as it takes to get them delivered. Who knows, maybe the 12th or 23rd time’s the charm?
- Change your ESP frequently. You’ll get fresh clean IPs every time!
- Use as many IPs as possible regardless of your total campaign volume. Whether you’re sending 1,000 messages or 1,000,000 always use as many IPs as you can. That way they’ll all stay toasty warm.
- Use as many of these action words in your subject lines, preferably in ALL CAPS: 100%, Free, Bargain, Discount, Don’t Delete, Fast Cash, For You, Great, Prize, Cheap, Save, Winner, Cash, Urgent, etc.
- Send attachments. For example, a lot of people like to print their emails so sending a PDF of your email will ensure that it prints out just like you designed it.
- Use creative, fictitious Friendly From names. This really helps with open rates — who wouldn’t want to open an email from Beyoncé?
- Don’t waste time sending test emails. Be brave and just let your campaigns fly! Testing just slows you down and it’s wimpy too. Fire away!
- Don’t use confirmed Opt-In. All this does is make your recipient think they’re in charge.
- Never use sophisticated email data intelligence tools to understand how your email is being delivered and received by your readers. Imagine being able to know and predict how your email is going to perform? How many are reading it, deleting it, sending it to spam? Who needs that many details? Just blast away and wait for the money to come rolling in.
Okay, now if you’ve made it this far, I’m sorry — Happy APRIL FOOL’S DAY! Please make sure you do the exact opposite of every one of these tips and your email program will be nobody’s fool. Be on the lookout for our forthcoming Email Deliverability Best Practices whitepaper that will debunk all of the deliverability nonsense and show you all of the right ways to ensure inboxing success.
