If you are not making money from email marketing or not making enough, it might be because you are making these mistakes.
Give me a few minutes and I will explain three of the biggest email marketing mistakes today why you should not send an email to your entire list each time you have something new to share.
Why having one domain name reserve for your business is a sure way to cost valuable time and money.
if you send your score ever drops below average.
And why not?
Having test email accounts will mean your mail will likely go into the promo box or got forbid, the spam box of your subscribers without you even knowing it.
You’ll definitely want to read this content because as a bonus, I will even explain the main factors that determine if your email is delivered or not to your subscribers at all.
When I learned email marketing years ago, I didn’t realize that email has its own algorithm.
It’s like a social media platform like Instagram.
When you post a picture on Instagram and no one likes the photo.
Instagram will show your photo to fewer of your followers.
Same thing as sending emails.
If you send out a mass email and no one opens it, the email service provider of your contacts will reduce the deliverability of your next mass email.
I know this might sound frustrating, but believe me, it’s for our own protection.
This algorithm is one way our inbox combats spam.
Before we talk about the top three mistakes, beginners make while email marketing.
Let’s first talk about your email quality score.
Your email quality score or sender score is determined by five factors.
- How many people are opening your emails?
- How many are clicking the link?
- How many are sharing it, forwarding it, marketing it as important, giving it a label and etc.?
- How many of your emails bounced and how many people are subscribed or mark your email as spam?
This means that the more people open your mail click on the link or share it, the higher your sender score and the more people will receive your future emails.
The reverse is also true.
If lots of people don’t open your mail or Got forbid, marked as spam, it will hurt your future deliverability.
And this brings us to the first mistake that beginners make in email marketing, emailing your entire list every time if it makes you feel any better.
Mistake #1
This was the first mistake I made.
So I had about 5000 people on my list at the time and every time I send out a newsletter, I will send it to everyone.
And it makes sense, right?
I mean, why don’t you send it to everyone on your list and I wonder why my open rates were dropping each time.
The truth is, not all your contacts are on your list are created equal.
Some are very active, while others will ignore your emails altogether.
If you keep sending your entire list each time, the inactive members will drag your sender score down, each time hurting your future deliverability.
This is why our first strategy is to separate the most active subscribers from the inactive ones.
You are probably familiar with list hygiene, right?
Which is to remove or relocate people who don’t engage with your emails by segmenting your list and sending mail to your most active subscribers.
More often, you will gradually increase your sender score, which will increase the likelihood of more people receiving your mail besides your sender score your email.
Deliverability is also affected by your IP address reputation and your domain reputation.
Each email service provider has its own IP address reputation.
That’s why it’s important to use a reputable email service like the four famous ones we talked about in the previous post.
If you use a random service with a bad IP address reputation, your email would not have the same reach as a reputable service.
Your domain name also has its own reputation.
It’s based on your activity and age.
As you send out more and more emails, you will develop a reputation for that domain name.
So if you are getting poor deliverability on your emails, you can always change to a different domain name.
And that’s where the second biggest mistake of email marketing comes in.
Mistake #2
Having only one domain name reserved for your business.
One domain name is like not having a backup plan.
It’s like putting all your eggs into one basket.
It’s fine if your email deliverability is good, but what if it’s not and your sender score drops.
Now, if you go and buy a new domain name at that time and start using a new domain name to start sending your emails, your email deliverability may still be low.
Why?
Because email service providers know your new domain name is new, you just purchased it and it doesn’t have a reputation yet the email service providers will limit your email reach until it grows in reputation.
That’s why our second deliverability strategy is to have at least three domains reserved for your business.
Like if you have a coaching service and your domain name is X, Y, Z, coaching.com, consider buying several variations of it, like the X, Y, Z, coaching.com or X, Y, Z coachingnow.com and keep it under your ownership.
As long as you owned them, they will age with your account, and the next time you want to use them, they won’t be brand new without any reputation.
Having at least three domain names also allows us to use Vann’s email marketing strategies in the future, like sending your most engaged subscribers from one domain name and your least engaged subscribers from a different domain name.
Don’t worry, we will talk about these advanced strategies in a different article.
If you use Gmail, you’ll notice that in addition to your inbox and your spam box, you also have a promotion box.
Now, how does Gmail determine which email you get goes in which box beside your sender score and your IP address, reputation, and domain name?
Yep.
There is another factor that determines whether your email ends up in your contacts spam voter or not, and that is dependent on your email, subject, line, email body, or links in the body.
If your subject line looks spam with trigger words like Make Money Now, it’ll probably be marked as a promo.
If your body copy is full of pictures and animations, it will probably be marked as spam.
And if the link that you put in the body is from a domain name with a bad reputation, it’ll probably also be marked as spam.
So how can we figure out which of our emails are getting into our contacts inbox and not a spam or promo box?
Congrats.
We reached the third biggest mistake.
Mistake #3
Beginners make an email marketing, not having test email accounts way.
We even are congratulating these mistakes.
Probably not anyways.
The only foolproof way to know which box our emails are landing in is to test the strategy is to create test email accounts.
One you always open and click on the link inside and another that you never open.
The Never Open Test email account is very important, and yet it’s often not done, which makes it a mistake.
You want to create a test email account where you never opened the emails that you get.
Why?
Because it is a way to test a segment of your list that never opens up your emails.
If these people never open your mail, do they still get your mail in their inbox, the spam box, or the promo box?
How would you know?
That is why we have a never opened test email account so we can observe what happens once you have them to test email accounts set up.
The next time you send out a mass email, you send it to these two accounts first and see what happens if it’s landing in the spam or promo box.
You want to make changes to your email before you mass send it.
You can start changing the subject, line the body or links, and we send it again to see if it now arrives in the inbox.
Having a few test accounts is the best way to figure out if your emails are being delivered properly or not.
Conclusion
First, if you have a list, start segmenting the list into two groups, people who engage with your emails actively and people who do not create a second list to house the inactive users.
Second, make sure you have at least three domain names reserved for your business.
The small investment of purchasing an extra domain name is definitely worth it once we get into advanced strategies later on.
And third, create two email accounts, one in which you open all emails that you send yourself and one that you never open.
Doing this will allow you to see if your mail is being delivered properly to your contacts’ inbox or not.
