EMAIL DELIVERABILITY: WHAT YOU MUST KNOW PT. 2

Crimes of email are the things that can harm your email deliverability.

Bad email addresses. This includes sending emails to wrong, invalid, abandoned, non-existing, or spam-trap (more on those later) email addresses. When these are identified in your email stats, remove them from your list.

Sending frequency of email. Once you have welcomed a new subscriber, preferably with a welcome sequence of emails, it is critical to be on an emailing schedule and stick with it. Don’t send too frequently. In the writer space, emailing every day seems excessive and time-consuming. But emailing less than once a month is also a mistake. Another mistake many people make is in welcoming a new subscriber with automation and then not emailing again for months. By then, people may forget who you are and wonder why you are emailing them. And then they may mark your email as spam.

Sending irrelevant emails. Never email off-topic just to be sending something out to subscribers. Emails need to stay on topic. If you’re an author, there are plenty of things you can talk about that will interest subscribers. What’s off-topic? If it isn’t related to you personally, your books, or your niche? It may be off-topic. If you are a master gardener and your email list is comprised of gardeners, and you send an email about car repair, you’re off-topic. If you have a florist shop and your delivery van was struck by a bigger truck, and you lost $10,000 worth of roses, that is on topic. It is also an opportunity to use a story in your emails, which subscribers love.

Sending emails to people who have unsubscribed. There are tactics to try to bring some of these people back, but that is off-topic for this article. If you don’t have those tactics in place (or understand them) to try to win them back, stop emailing them. Let them know they’ve been unsubscribed and that you appreciate them. You should have an unsubscribe link in all outgoing emails to make it easy for people to remove themselves from your list. Many email service providers will automatically add it to your emails and you only need to customize the text. If you keep emailing these people, they may start marking your emails as spam. People’s interests change over time. Respect their desire to unsubscribe.

Not opening your emails. This happens for many reasons. Maybe subscribers get high volumes of emails and even though they subscribed to your list, they aren’t opening them. Maybe they forgot who you are because you waited too long to email them. Maybe they lost interest, and instead of unsubscribing, they just ignore your emails.

Deleting emails without opening them. This situation has the same causes as not opening emails, only this time, your emails are deleted instead of being ignored.

Marking emails as read without opening them. This sends signals that your content might be spam or isn’t worth reading.

Amount of time readers engage with your emails. Opening your emails isn’t enough. Subscribers need to engage with them. If they simply open and then close the email, it appears that the email lacks value. They need to spend time reading and engaging with your email.

Interaction with links. Subscribers need to click your links. Ignoring them can send signals of spam or low value.

Subject line, preheader text, footer text. If ISP spam filters find spammy or irrelevant text, the email will go to the spam folder. What things should be avoided in these areas?

• Using all capital letters. It is best to use a subject line that looks like a normal sentence. Capitalize the first letter of the first word only. Don’t use a period at the end of the subject line.

• Too many special characters. Be cautious of special characters (such as exclamation points). Be very conservative with these, if using them at all.

• Issues with links. This includes using link shorteners. And using HTTP:// URLs instead of HTTPS:// URLs. The S of HTTPS indicates security that HTTP links lack.

• Too many images. These are emails that have too many images or images with no text at all.

• Spam trigger words. There are many words and phrases associated with spam emails. Here is a list of words and phrases that are associated with spam.