8:50am
Saint Paul
Today I wanted to share some tech tips for better email delivery on MailChimp (what I use) or any other way you send an email from your own domain.
If you’re in business and you’re not following these rules, your email delivery will suffer.
As a result, you’ll lose customer communication, and with it… sales.
These are the rules that govern the internet, young one, so pay attention.
Tech Tip #1
Computer Domains (i.e. my marketing business rockpapershootllc.com or my blog persuasionreadinglist.com) and Internet IP Addresses (i.e. 104.20.101.316) aren’t always trustworthy senders.
(I knew this from my IT days — computers on the internet get hacked and spam out millions of messages).
Because emails from your domain are not automatically trusted, it’s best if you can pair a domain and IP to gain a reputation.
But that’s not always possible. So some smart people created a tool called LemList.com that “warms up” your domain name by emailing back and forth to its own accounts, always removing any Spam flagging. This trains Google and Barracuda and all the big names to see your domain as not Spam.
Then, after a few weeks, your email domain and address gains a trustworthy reputation. (I’ve not used LemList yet, but great idea.)
Tech Tip #2
Another Domain thing — you want to avoid “burning” your main domain name if you’re sending to a cold list. To protect your main domain, send out your promotional stuff with a similar domain that, when visited in a browser, the web server redirects the visitor to your main domain.
For example persuasion-reading-list.com (join the list here). Those hyphens count as a new domain name (which I’d have to purchase to use, but I don’t send spam so I don’t expect to burn my real domain). Make sure your emails and website for the secondary name both forward to the right place. This adds a layer of protection for your main domain’s reputation.
Tech Tip #3
More email stuff — it’s essential to have “DKIM records” and “SPF records” in your DNS to verify your sender (MailChimp or whatever) has permission to send on your behalf.
Otherwise, the mis-match of your website’s IP Address and the sending IP of the email will look suspicious to spam filters, raising the score and lowering your delivery rates.
As an IT guy, I know what this means and how to set this up, so lucky me.
This might be a bit technical for many marketers, but it’s important that you learn how to do this (or hire a marketer that knows).
Tech Tip #4
Spam filters give a lower score —and better delivery— to addresses that are in a recipient’s address book.
When someone signs up for your email list, ask them to write back to you. You gain some insight into your customers, and your address gets added to their contacts.
Tech Tip #5
Before sending out your marketing emails, you can test their spamminess on websites such as Mail-Tester.com and GlockApps.com.
These tools help to identify issues that will lower your email deliverability, so that you can fix them.
In addition to these technical tips, the way you use email marketing makes a difference too.
List Segmentation to treat different customers differently…
Testing of headlines/subjects, and opening sentences (called ‘leads’)…
and Automated Funnels to move your customers from a Welcome to the List to a Here’s Who I Am to a Buy Something Won’t Ya?
But those aren’t Tech Tips, and today was a technical day.
If you’re interested to get more bang from your email marketing, maybe I can help.