10 email marketing tools to help build, send, automate and optimize your campaigns

Email isn’t the easiest channel to master, but luckily there is a wide range of email marketing tools to help nail every step of a campaign.
This article covers everything from building an email template to post-campaign optimization. So what can these email marketing tools help with?

Building email templates

There are several levels of complexity when it comes to building emails. At the simplest end of the spectrum is purchasing a pre-built email template. Some email marketing tools will even provide their own database of templates for you to choose from. If you’re looking for a simple, easy-to-manage solution, this is a safe bet.
If you need a custom email template (or simply don’t like any of the existing templates), then an email builder should be your next port of call. These come in two flavors – a ‘WYSIWYG’ (What You See Is What You Get) drag-and-drop builder, or actual HTML code.
Most major email service providers (ESPs) will provide a template builder (with varying degrees of success), and all will allow you to input straight HTML. However, HTML requires you to code the email from scratch, or adapt an existing one. Both of these options are time- and resource-intensive, even if you have the skills to do it. However, it does allow you to access more advanced functionality, like dynamic content in emails.
Below are three good examples of email marketing tools that can be used to build emails. And if you’re in the market for a new ESP, here are seven things you mustn’t forget to ask your email marketing vendor.

• Litmus offer a collection of free, high-quality email templates. They even have a tool to help you see how they’ll look in different email clients.
• Benchmark offer a simple drag-and-drop editor and allow you to create branded signup forms.
• Campaign Monitor offer a template builder with the ability to add dynamic content. For each element in the email, there is a drop-down menu labelled ‘who should see this’ from which you can select segments of your audience.

Segmenting and sending emails

Now you’ve built your email template and it’s polished to a high shine, the next step is to work out which part of your audience to send it to – and, of course, to actually send it.
A recent study by Mailchimp found that segmented campaigns delivered an average of 14% higher open rates, a 9% lower bounce and a whopping 101% increase in click-through rate. So it’s worth investing the time into properly segmenting your audience before sending your emails. Tailoring the messaging, subject line and body content of your emails to each segment is a great strategy to improve engagement.
Of course, any time spent segmenting your audience is ultimately wasted if those messages aren’t delivered. So it’s also a good idea to invest in tools that ensure deliverability. Tools like Sendforensics let you test your emails before your campaign goes out, giving you a sense of whether your emails will land in inboxes or junk folders.
When it comes to actually sending your emails, below is a selection of email marketing tools that allow you to do so in bulk:

• Mailchimp is the market leader in terms of number of users, primarily because of the sheer simplicity of its interface. It also has a bunch of free email marketing tools which are great for small businesses – such as an HTML to text email converter that ensures your recipients can always see the content, regardless of their email client.
• Sendpulse offers a range of features like forms, mobile-optimization and a scheduler. It can also handle high volumes of emails (good for large mailing lists).
• Fospha is a ‘Customer Data Platform’, designed to track behaviour and customer profiles, using that data to create smart segments based on specific interests and behaviours. It also uses machine learning for clustering and personalization.

Automating email campaigns

Automation is one of the best email marketing tools available. Simple rules-based automation is offered by most providers, allowing you to set up entire campaigns based on user behavior, demographics and stage in the funnel.
One common application of email marketing automation is sending abandonment emails. This is a simple remarketing strategy used by ecommerce retailers to target customers who either add items to their basket but fail to complete the checkout, or simply browse items before leaving.
On average, 69% of customers leave their order behind before purchase. Using email marketing automation, a simple rule can be set up to trigger an email send to these customers, encouraging them to return to the site and complete their purchase. One shoe retailer was able to recover 24% of abandoned carts and drive an additional 5% revenue per month using this method.
Below are a few email marketing tools that can help automate elements of your campaigns. For more on marketing automation, check out our guide on How to choose the right marketing automation vendor.

• HubSpot is one of the biggest and most versatile players in the market, offering an intuitive interface to set up triggers and responses, along with lead scoring capabilities to help make your automated campaigns more intelligent and targeted.
• GetResponse offer time-based email triggers, which are effective for campaigns that require multiple touchpoints, such as welcome emails. GetResponse call these ‘autoresponders’ and list a few examples here.
• Marketo is another big player in the automation space, with a diverse range of features including automated push notifications, in-app messaging, and real-time location-based marketing.

Tracking, testing and optimizing your emails

As with any high-volume marketing channel, optimization is essential. Small changes to things like send time, subject lines and sender address can have a significant impact on open and click-through rates.
The first step is to track these metrics. Every ESP on the market has analytics in some form or another. Keep an eye on any spikes in bounce rate and other delivery metrics to ensure you aren’t penalized for spam, and on open and click-through rates to assess performance.
Once a baseline is established, it’s time to test the performance of regular emails against experimental ones. Make sure to only test one thing at a time, and for a period of at least a few weeks, to ensure changes cannot be attributed to other factors.
By continuing to test and track results, regular emails will be optimized over time. Here are a few email marketing tools that can help speed up that process:

• Salesforces’ Pardot offers A/B email testing, lets you view test data in real time and automatically selects the best-performing email to send to the rest of your recipients once the test is over.
• Phrasee applies its machine learning tool to every aspect of an emails, including subject lines, body copy and calls to action and triggers.
• The Hemingway App is, honestly, just great fun to use. It analyzes text and grades it based on boldness and clearness, highlighting hard-to-read phrases, clichés and use of the passive voice. For marketers who struggle with copywriting (come on, don’t be shy), this is a great little tool.

For more on making sure that your email marketing technology is ready for the future, don’t miss ClickZ Intelligence’s report, Email and the Age of First-Person Marketing: Is your email technology ready for the future?

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The Complete Guide to Email Automation for Beginners

If you’re a marketer, you’ve probably heard of email marketing automation.

Email marketing automation is an essential part of building a profitable email list for any online business.

In this article I’ll try to cover some important points:

1. How does email automation work? 
2. What type of events trigger automation? 
3. The main terms you need to know before getting started 
4. Email marketing automation tools 

If you are unsure of everything email automation can do for you, then read on…

How does email automation work?

With email automation, when an event happens, an email is triggered (automatically sent). The email is sent from your email marketing tool or from your marketing automation tool.

The relevance of the email, and its timing is important. With a bit of smart automation, you can send the right email at the right time and to the right person, with information that is relevant to them, based on the actions they take on your website.

Another important thing is cleaning your email list. By doing so, you know that the email addresses are real and still active. Read more about how to clean your email list here.

What type of events trigger an automation

Below are some simple examples to understand what I am talking about:

• Email after someone signs up to your email list 
• Email when a website visitor is a previous subscriber – When someone is an email subscriber and visits your website, some email marketing tools can track which pages they have visited on your website and then trigger an email based on this. 
• Survey response – You sent an email to your subscribers and asked them if they were interested in a product. Based on their answer, a different email (or series of emails) is automatically sent. 
• Cart abandonment email – If you collect the email address of the person during the sales process – or if you already have the email address as the customer is an existing subscriber – you can follow up via email to encourage them to come back. 

Did you know that the average cart abandonment rate for e-commerce providers is over 60%. More than half of shoppers abandon their purchase after adding products to their cart.

What are the main terms you need to know before you start with email automation?

Before you get started with email automation, you need to get familiar with some of the most used terms of email marketing:

• Opt-in/Subscribe – when someone opts in to receive emails from you 
• Double opt-in – when someone opts in to receive emails from you and they need to confirm their opt-in 
• Spam – when someone doesn’t opt-in and you send them emails, or when someone does optin and you overdo it 
• Unsubscribe – when someone unsubscribes from your email list 
• Trigger – describes an event that causes something to happen (an email is sent) 
• Sequence – the sequence of emails that are sent after an event happens 
• Email campaign/Autoresponder – a series of emails that are sent for a specific event 
• Bounce rate – the rate at which emails are not delivered. A soft bounce is temporary, but a hard bounce is permanent and means that your message can never be delivered to that email address. 
• CTR – stands for Click-Through-Rate and is the number of times people click on links within an email 

Email marketing automation tools

The main difference between an email automation tool and a basic email marketing tool, is the functionality and the price. An email marketing tool is used for sending regular emails such as newsletters. With a marketing automation tool you can build automation around those emails.

Some features of a marketing automation tool are:

• email sequence builder 
• landing page builder 
• analytics 
• program management – manage marketing campaigns across multiple channels 
• online behavior tracking – email subscribers visiting your website 
• and more. 

If you’re looking for a marketing automation tool, you have a large variety to choose from.

Here are some popular examples: 

• ConvertKit – designed specifically for bloggers 
• GetResponse – growing functionality, but not as powerful as some of the other tools below 
• InfusionSoft – complex to use but very powerful 
• Ontraport – doesn’t integrate with as many products as InfusionSoft does 
• HubSpot – very useful and comprehensive tool, but the price will be higher compared to the other two 

What are the steps for building an email automation sequence

For any sequence that you want to build, the required steps will be similar.

1. Find out who you want to attract

Start by analyzing the customers who have bought from you in the past and try to figure out what are the characteristics and interests of your customers.

2. Do some research about the issues of your existing customers/audience

The next step is to do some research and find out the issues your customers/audience encounter while using your services/product. Doing that will help you come up with an incentive for people to subscribe to your services/product.

3. Use the info collected and create your incentive

Use the information from the above steps to create a buzz around that topic. You could also create a guide as a solution or use the info in your opt-in message. This will get people to sign up and then all you have to do is to offer them a free trial of your product.

4. Direct people to make the action you want them to make

You need to create some sort of a “map”, to think in advance. First you have a welcome email, then some follow-up emails with links to the guide created in the step above. After that, what should they do?
They could become a customer, so you must move them to a customer list
If they don’t become customers, you can move them to a newsletter list

A tool you can use for that is Lucidcharts.

5. Create your emails

When you’re creating the emails, think about the relationship you want to build with the subscriber. Make them feel welcome, as part of the community, tell them about yourself and deliver your promises (free trial, a guide, etc.).

With every email you send, make sure that you are building a relationship as well as providing quality content.

6. Create the sequence in the email automation tool

You will need to create a sequence, add emails to that sequence and then specify when the emails will be sent.

An example:
Welcome email – send immediately
Email no.2 – 2 days later
Email no.3 – 4 days later
Free trial/discount offer – 5 days later
Offer reminder – 6 days later
Add them to a customer list if they bought, or to a newsletter list if they didn’t

*days are counted after the welcome email is sent

Note: Your series of emails will be different depending on the type of service you provide and who you are targeting.

7. Deploy your opt-ins and segment your audience

Now you can setup the opt-ins on your site. Depending on the marketing tool you use, you might have the functionality and opt-ins required, but it’s always better to use a specialized tool.

OptinMonster has some smart functionalities and it also provides multiple ways to collect opt-ins.

Some examples of OptinMonster functionalities:
opt-ins based on your blog categories; this means that you can segment people based on where they opted in.
different opt-ins based on the page they visit
different opt-in based on their location
different opt-in based on their actions (abandon the cart or product purchase)
A/B testing for different opt-ins

8. Drive traffic to the opt-ins

Now that everything is in place, it’s time to drive some traffic to the opt-ins. This could be organic traffic, referrals from other sites, paid traffic from Google, Bing, Facebook Ads, etc.

9. Analyze and optimize your results

Measure what works and optimize it. To improve your opt-in rate you can change the words, the opt-in style or the incentive.

The same thing is available for your email sequence: if you notice that people are not opening your emails, you can test different subject lines. Keep in mind that the way you communicate with your new email subscribers needs to be completely different to the way you communicate with existing customers. You will need to split these two out.
Wrap

Successfully segmenting your email list guarantees that messages are landing in the right inbox at the right time.

You can educate. You can connect. You can sell.

Remember, the number one rule of email marketing automation is to keep your users’ experience as your top priority, so think outside of the (in)box!

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105 ways to build your email list | Tips, tactics, and best practices

 One of the first steps in any email marketing campaign is pulling together a list of addresses from people likely to be interested in what you have to say or promote.

That said, building a list from scratch can seem a little overwhelming at first. After all, newbies are in a bit of a catch-22 situation: They can’t start a campaign without addresses, but they’re often so dependent on email that they don’t know how to ask customers to opt in without emailing them. So how do you build an email list without email addresses? Once you have addresses, what do you do with them? How often should your send emails? What can you do to ensure your emails are delivered and not lost in spam or junk filters?

Find the answers to these questions and more in our free eBook, Guide to Email List Management. Download it today to learn the tricks and tools to managing a successful email list.

Still need to gather more email addresses for your contact list? Fear not! With diligence and a little creativity, you can build a solid list of interested addressees through a variety of methods. Here we’ve compiled by category 105 strategies, tips, tools, and ideas to help you find viable, interested consumers to add to your email subscriber list.

General tips to keep in mind

1. Only use email addresses you have gathered with permission. Buying a list of consumer names is a bad idea since it heightens the risk of complaints, bounced addresses, unsubscribes, or accusations of spam. 
2. Experiment with new methods – ranging from pen and paper to online forms – and maximize the most effective ones.
3. Methods borrowed from others may not work for you, depending on your industry or business.
4. Once your list grows, segment audiences to increase strategy effectiveness.
5. Avoid being pushy; if you offer value, loyalty will follow.
6. Consider automation tools that can handle your busywork.

Fine-tune your opt-in form

7. Make signups less invasive by initially requesting only addresses.
8. Offer subscription options addressing content and intervals.
9. Leverage testimonials from satisfied recipients.
10. Mention subscriber numbers if they’re substantial.
11. Promote exclusivity by offering subscribers something only they can get.
12. Give away something valuable to all subscribers.

Optimize email addresses you already have

13. Gather your addresses from transactional business communications.
14. Share email lists with complementary businesses (with permission from your subscribers).
15. Include a signup link in all your personal emails.
16. Place forward-to-a-friend links in all emails.

Use your website as a portal

17. Promote your email by social media, website, and blog. There is no limit to where you can include a signup form for your email list.
18. Design a separate landing page specifically for signups.
19. Treat your blog home page like an email capture form.
20. Use Leadboxes from Leadpages in author bylines used on your site.
21. Conduct a heat map test to identify best places for opt-in buttons.
22. Test-drive CTA locations including your 404 page, sidebars, headers, footers, pop-up boxes, slide-ins that appear halfway down a page, or “sticky” forms that move down with scrolling.
23. Require commenters on your own blog to provide addresses.
24. Offer opt-ins to anyone “liking” comments on your blog.
25. Exchange opt-in links with other businesses’ newsletters.
26. Incorporate opt-ins within online forums your prospects might visit.
27. Buy paid ads on websites your customers are likely to frequent.
28. Offer subscribers free downloads of your business app.
29. Offer subscribers a free eBook or informational guide.
30. Establish a riveting blog that ends in an opt-in request.
31. Post limited content on your site; offer upgrades upon subscription.
32. Launch a viral competition in which subscribers benefit by recruiting others.
33. The SumoMe List Builder app launches opt-in ads toward visitors about to leave your site.
34. The SumoMe Scroll Box app launches ads toward visitors who scroll down.
35. Custom poll creator Qualaroo can ask visitors about subscribing.
36. Establish a highly visible confirmation page on your site that reiterates subscription benefits.

Promote signups on social media

37. Incorporate opt-in links to your promotional YouTube videos.
38. On Pinterest, attract subscribers via Pins leading to your signup form.
39. Add opt-ins to your business and personal social media profile sections.
40. Email opt-ins to anyone mentioning your business on social media.
41. Publish opt-ins on your LinkedIn company page and within LinkedIn discussions.
42. Create compelling images to post on Instagram; include opt-ins.
43. Stage sweepstakes and require entrants to provide addresses; Rafflecopter runs Facebook giveaways.
44. Create a contest inviting minute-long videos on why customers like your product. Post results on social media, asking voters to submit addresses in order to vote.
45. Run paid Facebook ads touting you email newsletter.
46. Online tool Woobox sets up quizzes related to your brand; participants share results on social media and provide addresses.
47. Online tool Binkd gathers addresses from participants who tweet about your brand in exchange for entry in a prize drawing.

Capture in-store customers

48. Print opt-in information on your receipts.
49. Gather business cards/addresses for a weekly or monthly prize drawing.
50. Place signs and signup sheets in highly visible places.
51. Make opt-in by smartphone effortless by displaying your QR code.
52. Ask all callers if they’ll opt in.
53. Use a sandwich board to request emails.
54. Ask for email addresses as customers sign receipts or business agreements.
55. Add opt-in invitations to shopping bags.
56. Gather addresses during in-store promotional events.
57. Offer customers discounts or free products for referrals.
58. Gather emails from customers responding to your Groupon, LivingSocial, or similar promotions.

Don’t forget snail mail

59. Mail postcards offering incentives for subscribing.
60. Include opt-in invitations with invoices.
61. Include inbox requests inside every shipped package.

Look for other opportunities

62. Use your smartphone to log addresses at business networking events.
63. Feature opt-in offers on your business cards.
64. Bring signup forms to trade shows, chamber of commerce events, and other business gatherings.
65. Text customers about your pending newsletter and invite them to opt in.
66. Place ads in local publications that prospects are likely to read.
67. Solicit addresses when your business appears at fundraisers, festivals, artisan markets, etc.
68. Tout the benefits of your subscriber birthday or anniversary club.
69. Pay employees commission for securing viable addresses.
70. Offer discounts to customers providing others’ addresses.
71. Stage daily deals at your business, requiring participants to opt in.
72. Book speaking engagements; offer subscribers free consultations.
73. Gather addresses of those who mention your business on Foursquare.
74. Justuno can automatically provide subscribers a relevant coupon code.
75. Set up a WordPress community for your business, then post opt-ins.
76. Use BuiltWith.com to discover tools competitors use to build their lists.

Build repeat business through credibility

77. Create a comprehensive year-long email marketing plan.
78. Optimize personalization tools to customize your campaign.
79. Keep subject lines creative, clear, and urgent.   
80. Develop a voice likely to appeal to your key audience.
81. Keep messages brief and highly digestible.
82. Create a not-to-be-missed email newsletter.
83. Use variety, interspersing promotional messages with helpful information.
84. Create emails informing customers of your latest and greatest inventory.
85. Create emails explaining how to get the most from your business or product.
86. Consider emails that share your company’s successes.
87. Repurpose popular blog posts, videos, or other marketing messages into email.
88. Ensure all visuals are crisp, high quality, and engaging.
89. Use humor when appropriate.
90. Optimize messaging opportunities centered around holidays and other events.
91. Create and tout clever special events related to your business.
92. Incorporate effective calls to action (CTAs) that are easy to respond to via link or button.
93. Offer visually appealing, easy-to-digest layouts.
94. Ensure all messages are mobile-friendly and easy to open on any device.
95. Sign up for and evaluate competitors’ email campaigns and newsletters.
96. Study industry trends and how they might work for you.
97. Resist giving away valuable longer-form content without subscriptions.
98. Use creative videos within emails to grab viewer attention.
99. Tease recipients with hints about your next email(s).

Gauge your effectiveness

100. Frequently employ A/B split testing to fine-tune audience preferences.
101. Use surveys to ask audiences how you’re doing. Free services like SurveyMonkey, KwikSurveys, and SurveyPlanet can help.
102. Measure your conversion rates, bounce rates, open rates, and unsubscribe rates relative to industry standards.  
103. Constantly cull your list by deleting subscribers that haven’t interacted with your emails or brand.
104. Include unsubscribe links allowing users to indicate why they’re unsubscribing.
105. Listen closely to customer feedback and adjust accordingly.

Want to learn more about the nuts and bolts of using and implementing your email marketing list?

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7 Ways to Use Marketing Automation to Grow Your Business [GUIDE]

We know that small business owners have no shortage of tasks on their daily to-do lists, and we’re here to help you shorten it even more.

Implementing automated features make attracting and maintaining customers a snap. In this guide, we’ll cover the specific automated steps you can implement for email and social media marketing. Before we start, let’s talk about the top four benefits of automation so you understand why it’s so valuable:

1. Save time
One of the biggest benefits of automation is that it allows you to save lots of time. By setting a few marketing emails on auto-delivery, you won’t have to create and send individual emails every time you need to communicate with your list. If you use an automated platform for social media updates, you can schedule a series of posts at one time.

2. Reach customers in a timely manner
By using automated features, you’ll reach your customers quickly. For example, you can automate a welcome email that is sent 24 hours after a new contact is added to your list. This guarantees that new contacts get valuable information about your business in a timely fashion, even while you sleep.

3. Ability to work ahead
As a small business owner, it’s vital to ‘work ahead’ as much as possible. With automation, you can set up emails and social media posts in advance.

4. Turn prospective customers into paying customers
Automating some of your marketing tasks can help you convert interested customers into paying customers. In fact, a report published by Regalix showed that nearly 86 percent of businesses believe marketing automation is one of the most efficient ways to nurture and manage new leads.

Are you convinced yet? Excellent! Now let’s get down to the nuts and bolts of it all. Here are seven ways you can properly utilize marketing automation:

1. Capture emails through sign up forms
Before setting up automation, we suggest setting up an email sign up form on your business’s website. These simple forms help you collect names and email addresses from interested customers or clients.

The steady stream of new contacts that comes in through this form will give you an authentic list of email addresses to draw from to send emails to. Your efforts to build your email list should be ongoing, and a sign up form is a hassle-free way to keep names coming in with little effort on your part.

VerticalResponse has an email sign up form that you can use. It’s simple to set up and activate, and all of your new contacts go right into your VR account. From there you can automate emails to send out to your new and existing contacts.

If you prefer, you could also use a third-party service to create sign up forms that work as pop ups, sidebars, or sliders on your site.

Consider trying OptinMonster. If you’re using WordPress, ThriveThemes has a plugin you can use to collect customer information. Both of these sites make it easy for small business owners to establish “information collection points” on their websites. There is a cost to use these services, but you don’t need any website or coding experience to get started. 

2. Automate welcome emails
With a sign up form in place, one of the first marketing items you’ll want to automate is your welcome email. Since every new contact receives a welcome email, it makes sense to automate it.

If you decide to use the VerticalResponse sign up form to collect email address, the new contacts are automatically added to your list. You can go into your account, create a welcome email and set it up to deliver the warm greeting within 48 hours. You want to make sure that new contacts receive a welcome email shortly after they sign up for your email list, while their interest is still peaked.

The welcome email should outline the perks of receiving messages from your company and include links that direct customers back to your website.

If you need help creating a welcome email, we have several resources to check out:

10 Examples of Highly Effective Emails
7 Tips to a Stellar Welcome Email
7 Reasons Your Business Needs a Welcome Email 

3. Send a series of event reminders
Let’s say you have an event coming up or a big promotion. You can use automation to set up a series of emails that reminds your audience about it.

For example, when an insurance broker is hosting a day of free consultations, the owner should set up three emails to automatically send to customers. The first email describes the event in full; the second email is a reminder to sign up for a specific time slot before the consultation day is booked. A day before the event, a third email encourages people to take advantage of the few openings left and adds an incentive of free coffee and donuts.

All three of these emails can be created ahead of time and sent over the course of two weeks. All of the emails should include links back to your website where customers can find out more information.
You can apply this same concept to an upcoming sale, a charity event, a customer appreciation event or an appearance at a local trade show. The idea is to set up a series of emails that reminds your audience about a particular event.

4. Treat your loyal customers
Segment your list by pulling out the names of your most loyal customers and develop an automated email campaign that focuses on rewarding them. Consider writing an email that ‘Gives Thanks’ to your repeat customers for their loyalty and offers something in return. Maybe it’s a 10% off coupon, a voucher for a free service, the chance to be the first to try a new product, discounted shipping or some other kind of gift. You can set this email up to go out every other month for six months to encourage your loyal customers to keep buying.

For inspiration, take a look at this email from Ghurka, a leather accessory store, which honors loyal customers.

5. Encourage active customers to buy again
You can also automate a series of emails to entice recent buyers to buy again. If a customer has made a purchase or signed up for a service within the last 2-3 weeks, put them in their own group and prepare to create an automated email series specifically for them.

For example, in the first email you can thank them for the purchase and showcase additional merchandise you have in stock. Here’s an example from Crate&Barrel:



The second email could offer a discount on a similar product or announce the arrival of a new accessory. The second email could also be a gift guide that highlights several of your hottest items.

6. Bring old customers back
Similar to encouraging recent customers to buy again, you should also think about ways to re-engage inactive customers too.

Take a look at your email list and pull out the names of customers who haven’t purchased anything from your business in the past 6-8 months. Create a series of emails that are designed to get them back on your bandwagon.

The first email can simply say, “We miss you” and include a special offer. The second email, which you should send a week later, could contain a survey asking why the customer has strayed. The survey results can also offer valuable insight that you can use to maintain customers in the future.

7. Automate your social posts
With your email automation underway, you can now switch gears to social media automation. If your business uses more than one social site, you can use a social media management tool to automate the process.

Management tools let you schedule posts ahead of time, which drastically reduces the number of times you have to log in, create messages, and post them. With automated tools, you can set aside an hour per week and schedule posts for the entire forthcoming week.

For time-strapped business owners, automation prevents social neglect. After all, you don’t want your customers to get used to a minimally updated Facebook page or sparsely posted tweets.

So, which social media automation tools are the best? There are several options. It’s important to note that all of these apps offer a free plan, so definitely take them for a test drive and see which one fits your business before committing long-term.

HootSuite. This app syncs with several social media platforms including Facebook and Twitter. You can access all of your social accounts from one dashboard.
TweetDeck. If you’re an avid Twitter user, TweetDeck can help you schedule posts and monitor feeds.
IFTTT (If This Then That). For the more advanced social media user, IFTTT is a great option simply because there are more automation features to choose from with this one. As an example, you can easily link it to your business blog, and when a new post is added, a tweet will automatically go out to advertise the new content. You can also turn to content curating platforms. These tools give you a list of content that is relevant to your readers and enables you to share it with little fuss. This way you don’t have to scour your feeds looking for valuable content to share; the search is already done for you.

Swayy and Pocket are good content curation apps to start with. All you need to do is enter a list of general topics that you’d like to see in your feed and you’ll immediately get dozens of content options in your search findings. As you share this content, each platform hones in on your preferences and gives you more specific content that’s tailored to your needs over time. A word of caution
Automated marketing is a fantastic tool for small business owners, but you’ll want to use it in moderation. Not everything can, or should be scheduled in advance. For example, when breaking news happens that’s relevant to your industry, you’ll want to create day-of social media posts and emails. When a new employee comes on board, or you’ve decided to run a last-minute sale, you won’t be able to rely on automation either. Just remember, like any other resource, automation is another tool you can keep on your pegboard and use it as needed.

Share with us on social which parts of marketing you currently automate and how it works for you.


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Guide to Autoresponders Part 3: Follow-Up and Confirmation Emails

Autoresponders are an excellent way to stay engaged with leads and customers even while you’re busy doing other things. This kind of email automation saves you time and provides value to the recipients. In this final post, we examine follow-up emails and the automatic lift you get from incorporating them into your campaigns. We also look at various examples of confirmation emails and how to make them more than just a transactional message. But first let’s quickly recap what we cover in Part 1 and Part 2 of this guide.

In the first of this three-part series, we explore the top five ways your business can benefit from using email autoresponders. We also look at Welcome emails and how this type of autoresponder works to greet new subscribers and direct them to the next desired step with a clear call-to-action.

In part two, we provide an overview of Content Offer emails and how to get people to re-engage by offering quality content after a period of inactivity. We also show you a few examples of Survey and Feedback emails so you can set up a two-way line of communication with your customers.
For our final post, it’s all about follow-up and confirmation. Let’s get started!

Follow-Up Emails

We’ve written a lot about follow-up emails recently. That’s because by sending a follow-up email as part of your campaign you are likely to see an average 30% lift in your open rate.

Here’s an example we sent to VerticalResponse Classic customers this past April in celebration of Earth Day.



The open rate on the initial email was 21.15%. A few days later, we sent the same email to non-responders (the segment of the list that never opened the first email). That secondary, or follow-up email, received an open rate of 13.6%. That brought the new open rate up to 31.88%. By simply sending the same email to those who didn’t open the first one, we were able to lift the open rate by 50%.

As mentioned earlier, from what we’ve seen from our own campaigns to the campaigns of our small business customers who send follow-up emails, you can expect to see a 30% lift.

Just last week, VerticalResponse released a new feature for premium accounts that allows you to automatically schedule a follow-up email when you create and send an email campaign. This helps you maximize the results of your email without the extra work of manually segmenting your list of nonresponders and creating a new campaign. Both the original and the follow-up email stay tied together, and the results from both are visible in the reporting so you can easily see the benefit. We think it’s pretty super.

Confirmation Emails

When a customer makes a purchase, you can send an email to confirm the sale. Fitpacking, a backpacking adventure outfit, sends confirmation emails whenever someone books a trip.

“We’re small, and although there’s always someone staffing the company, during the busy season most of us are out in the wilderness guiding trips,” Steve Silberberg of Fitpacking explains. “If someone signs up for a trip and we can’t get back to them in a timely manner, they will quickly lose patience and withdraw or go elsewhere. That’s why we rely heavily on autoresponders to confirm trips.”

Here is an example of the confirmation email that Fitpacking customers get. It’s a simple text –only email but gets the job done.



In this next confirmation email, Mountain Play Association confirms the purchase and also provides links in anticipation of frequently asked questions..



Another use of confirmation emails is to confirm a recipient’s involvement in a contest. Check out these triggered emails for new contest entries:




Notice that both companies offer a promotion in their confirmation email to generate a sale.

Conclusion

Follow-up and confirmation emails are two autoresponders that make it easy for you to stay engaged with your customers. Use them to improve your email open rate, communicate important information, and inspire a sale.

Hop on your favorite social channel and tell us which autoresponders you use.


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Automation takes your email marketing strategy to the next level. If you’re new to email marketing, we created this Beginner’s Guide to lay the foundation. As soon as you have the basics down, you can up your game with autoresponders.

Last week in the first of this three-part series, we covered the benefits of autoresponders and explored a variety of Welcome Emails. In this second post, we dive into Content Offer and Survey Emails. Here’s what you need to know about these two types of email campaigns.
Content Offer Emails

You can educate your audience by sharing your knowledge. Keep them engaged with content you know they will find interesting and useful.

Let’s look at a couple of examples that offer quality content.

#1

The Expert Institute uses an autoresponder that combines a welcome email and content offering.

The email above welcomes the new recipient, provides a point of contact and also includes a link to an in-depth article.

#2

In this next example, you can see how Eventbrite communicates with people who haven’t used their app in a while. They tell the user how much they’ve missed them and offer some content to re-engage.




Both product and service-based businesses can use these two types of content offer emails. Send your version to new customers and those who haven’t purchased from you in a while. Aim to make the recipients feel connected by providing them with thoughtful and relevant content.
Surveys and Feedback Emails

Another way to get customers to engage is by sending an autoresponder that asks for their feedback triggered by a recent purchase. Collecting this kind of information can be of great benefit to your business, and customers appreciate the opportunity to share their thoughts.

#1

In the example below, a chance to win a gift card is offered as an incentive for writing a review. The email also includes instructions on how to write the review and a quick reference to the product that was purchased.





#2

Sending a survey is yet another way to elicit feedback and engage your audience. In the following example, Coastal.com explains the reason for the email and provides a link to the survey. It also conveys that the survey is quick and painless, which is a good thing to mention as short surveys are always better received.




Creating a survey is a simple process. Once you’ve done so, add the link to your automated email or create an eye-catching button that takes the recipient to the survey when clicked. Be sure to use a catchy and relevant subject line to help get opens and stay compliant with laws.

Conclusion

Both Content Offer and Feedback emails give you a way to engage with leads and customers. By setting up these kinds of autoresponders, you maintain communication and keep your brand and business top of mind.

For the final part in this series, we look at Follow-Up and Confirmation emails.

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3 Emails Your Business Should Be Sending

 Are your emails scheduled and sent like clockwork, or are they a little sporadic? (Don’t worry, we won’t tell!) Do you only send out one type of email, or do you have a variety of emails for every transaction or occasion? You don’t want to inundate your customers, readers, and/or leads, however, you do want to establish a relationship, build rapport, educate and of course, make some money. So, how do you accomplish all of this? By consistently sending out these three emails below – We’ll also tell you how often to send them and the best ways to execute. Let’s dive in:

1. Welcome Email
Are you rolling out the red carpet for your new customers? A recent study by Return Path found that 80% of companies now send out welcome emails, up from only 40% in 2008.

What to include in your welcome email:

• What to expect. Warmly welcome readers to your mailing list and set expectations immediately. Let your readers know what you’ll share with them in your future emails, and how often. For example, you may offer advice and how-to articles, as well as some promotional offers. You may send bi-weekly, monthly, or another frequency. Stay true to whatever you promise! (You can get even more tips on send frequency here.).

• A special offer. Want a little more love? Give your new subscribers a discount, offer, or gift for simply being a subscriber. Then, let your new subscribers know that as a subscriber, they’ll receive special email-only offers they can’t get anywhere else just by being on your list. They’ll be far more likely to open your future messages for enticing discounts.

*Timeliness is key when sending a welcome email. You want to send it out to your new subscribers as soon as possible after they subscribe.

2.  Newsletter
Many of our customers ask us about the difference between an email promotion/campaign and an email newsletter. The words are often used interchangeably, but an email promotion or campaign tends to communicate one single topic or idea, such as your current sale, or a new product, while an email newsletter often has multiple topics and tends to educate (vs. sell) and builds rapport with your readers. Your newsletter should always offer readers valuable information.

What to include in your newsletter:

• News. Press releases, blog articles or other publications that will help your readers. (It’s a good idea to summarize longer articles in a few short sentences and create a call to action button for the reader to view the entire article on your website or blog.)
• Upcoming events or webinars. These may be events you’re hosting or participating in. You may also announce speaking engagements such as interviews with your executives on radio shows, at college campuses and the like.
• Important announcements. Include improvements to your products or services, new management, or new business practices. (If you are letting your customers know you are responding to their feedback and improving something for them, that’s always great news!)
• Ways to connect on social media.  Include social networks you’re actively engaged on and updating regularly, as this is added value for your followers.
• Images. Keep your newsletter interesting with images relating to your content.
• Calls to actions.Tell your readers what you want them to do with clear calls to action such as read more, learn more, and register now. You can easily create call to action buttons for your website or emails and newsletters here.

Even though the word “newsletter” suggests a more lengthy communication, remember it’s still  an email amongst many others in the inbox! Try to avoid including too much information and text in one email. A good rule of thumb is no more than would fit on one page of a word document. Because newsletters are more comprehensive, once or twice a month is typically a good practice, however, depending on your business, and how much content you produce, weekly might work as well. If you want more information about newsletters, we have a handy webinar titled: Creating a Significant Email Newsletter

3. Promotional Emails
Everyday, most of us receive tons of emails from various companies and let’s be honest, most customers want to know “What’s in it for me?”. If you don’t provide real value, it’s very easy for subscribers to click that little unsubscribe button! How can you help avoid that? Offer something valuable and unique…

What to include in your promotional emails:

• A NEW offer. Emphasis on the word new. If you offered 10 percent off all window frames last month, it’s old news this month! If you do repeat a certain offer, don’t repeat it back-to-back or multiple times in a row (you’re readers will think you’re a one trick pony!).
• A compelling offer. Discounts are great, but does the discount you’re offering compel your readers to click through all the way to the shopping cart? Try testing different offers to see which ones are the most effective. Enticing customers with specific products or services can be more effective than a set discount amount off all items or services. This is especially true of seasonal items.
• Clear calls to action. Make it as easy as possible for the reader to get the promotion. This may mean buttons leading to a shopping page on your website or links to pages with already inserted promo codes or registration forms. Just make sure as few steps as possible are involved in going from reading your email to purchasing the product. Don’t make it hard to buy.

*Be cautious not to send promotional emails too often. Once every 2 weeks or once a month are good general practices.

By including these three types of emails in your email marketing plan, you can help keep your subscribers engaged, loyal and spending. You can get more helpful email marketing resources here including free guides, webinars are more.

Are there any other types of emails you think are important to include in your email marketing plan? Share in the comments!

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7 Email Testing & Delivery Tools for a Biz on a Budget

You hear so many rumors about what you can or can’t include in your email if you don’t want it to land in spam. But a lot of those are exactly that, rumors.

Using an ESP, like VerticalResponse, is an excellent start to ensuring inbox placement, but spam filters look for various things in emails to determine where they end up. Are there too many links in your email? Did you use the word “Free” one too many times? To help dispel the myths, we put some email testing and delivery tools to the test using the same HTML code and subject line from one of our recent newsletters. Here’s what we discovered:

Puts Mail

Puts Mail is a basic testing application, but you can get some good information about your HTML using this tool. First, they send you a test of your email, so you can see it in your inbox. If you’re using an ESP, you probably have this feature already, but if you don’t, it allows you to see your how your email will appear in the inbox of your choice. Then the tool goes through your code and detects if there’s anything that could cause an issue and what that might be. Our newsletter checked out okay, though anyone using Lotus Notes or Eudora may have some issues with the CSS that was included.

CSS is something that can be tricky in different email programs; if you’re using CSS, be sure to keep it inline to ensure it will work across a variety email programs. For more tips on HTML for emails, check out our HTML Tips for Designing Your Email guide.

Email on Acid

We’re fans of this tool because of the various email program display views. It’s always important to know how things will appear for all of your readers and the different programs they use. Email on Acid offers a free version that shows what your email looks like in Gmail and Outlook 2003, plus they take a look at your HTML and let you know if there are any issues. The paid versions offer more inbox examples, more analysis, and check for spam filter triggers. Our newsletter looked great with the free trial test on these two programs, but as we learned from the previous tool, there could be some rendering issues on older email programs.

Email Reach

Email Reach takes a different approach to testing emails by providing a seed list of addresses to test. The nice thing about this service is that they can test email programs around the world and on mobile.

You just need to download the list they provide, upload to your ESP and then send test emails to that seed list. They’ll give you reporting on how your email works in all the different accounts that they monitor. They offer a 24-hour free trial and then a paid version once that expires. They also check for spam folder placement and will analyze content and HTML for possible spam problems.

Lyris ContentChecker

If you’re worried about specific content that could cause your email to land in the spam folder, this is the free tool for you. Lyris checks the HTML and the content of your email and gives you score based on where the email will end up. Zero is the best, anything over 3.0 and they recommend changing your content to help ensure your email doesn’t get marked as spam. They’re checking through SpamAssassin, a very popular spam filter, for anything that is usually associated with spam. Their website gives you a quick analysis and then they send an email with more info and links to help you understand email delivery and how you can improve yours.  Our newsletter got a zero; we like to practice what we preach!

Litmus

Much like Email on Acid, Litmus offers a limited free test and a paid version with more bells and whistles. The free test covers pretty much any email program your readers could be using, plus mobile ones. While the other tests are done in seconds, this one takes awhile, but for free we were willing to wait a bit. There is also a subject line checker, to see how your From label and subject line will look in different email programs, landing page links and again, HTML analysis. There is one test per email address, but the paid version allows unlimited testing for all the features mentioned. As with the test on Puts Mail, our CSS was trouble but otherwise the email looked good.

Email Spam Test

Email Spam Test is another free tool that provides you information about whether your email may go to a spam folder. They don’t provide much detail, but if there was a potential issue with your code or content they let you know. Our newsletter did fine, although they weren’t sure about the subject line.

When we actually sent this newsletter, the subject line performed on target and our opens/clicks stats were right on the mark.

Postmark

This is also a free spam test, but it requires a bit more info than you may have. Not only do you need to paste in the HTML from your email, but you also need to include the full headers as well. It makes for a much more thorough test but also more time consuming. Just like Lyris, they’ll give you your SpamAssassin score and let you know how close to spam your email is.

There are many applications out there to test your email; these are just a few to get you started. Continue to test different things with your email and content especially if you find any problems getting delivered to the inbox.

We also have free guides to help you, and for more anti-spam specifics, check out our webinar, How to Avoid the Spam Folder.

Have you checked out any recent email testing apps yet? Let us know in the comments.


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6 Email Subject Lines That Really Work

6 Email Subject Lines That Really Work. In this video Jesse Forrest shares how to write email subject lines that get opened. Email copywriting and email subject lines can get your emails opened and read.

15 Email Marketing Best Practices 2016

15 email marketing best practices 2016. Top tips for better conversions and more sales. 

In this video, you will learn about some of the best email marketing practices for boosting sales. The email marketing tips include things like shortening email lengths, using a tease in the subject line, subscribing to other top brands to learn how they email, etc. If you use all 15 of these, you will be much more likely to see a nice increase in email marketing ROI. Enjoy the video!

Email Deliverability: How to Make Sure You Land in the Inbox

No matter how amazing your email content might be, if it never reaches your subscriber’s inbox, all your work will forever go unnoticed. No one will find out about your products, you won’t gain that strong trust with your potential customers, and it will be extremely difficult to make a living with your online business. But finding your way into an inbox isn’t as simple as just sending an email. You have to take email deliverability into consideration.

When it comes to email marketing, email deliverability can be one of the most confusing concepts. So to help you know how to get your content from your email service provider (ESP) to your subscriber’s inbox, today I’m breaking down the basics of what email deliverability means, how it affects your sending, and how to increase your chances of good deliverability.

First off, there will be some words and concepts that might sound like gibberish to anyone new to this topic. If you fall in this category or just want a little refresher about what I’m talking about, here’s a handy cheat sheet of deliverability terms you can download now to reference as you read.

DOWNLOAD THE DELIVERABILITY TERMS CHEAT SHEET

What is email deliverability and how is it determined?

Deliverability is a partnership between your IP/domain reputation, your email content, and your subscribers' email provider. As an ESP, our goal at ConvertKit is to get you in the door, meaning inbox deliveries within email providers like Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo. There are quite a few factors that determine how your email is filtered once it’s received by an Internet Service Provider (ISP), but your IP/domain reputation are likely the most determining factor on whether your messages are delivered into an inbox or a spam folder.

While your IP/domain reputations are determined through a combination of factors, research within our industry has shown that the most important factors are: Subscriber Engagement, Limiting Negative Metrics, Authentication, and Content. So let’s talk about how these four things come into play in terms of your email deliverability.

Subscriber Engagement

These days ISPs are paying close attention to how previous customers of that provider have interacted with email sent from your domain/IP. That means the future of your deliverability can depend on what your subscribers do with your emails right now.

For example, Gmail often will make assumptions on where to filter your email based on trends seen from their customers. That means if the majority of subscribers are deleting your emails without opening them, marking the messages as spam, or taking no action on it all, Gmail will make the determination to increase spam or promo folder filtering for your IP/domain and will lower your overall reputation with Gmail.

On the other hand, if a lot of people are opening and clicking (showing positive engagement), Gmail is more likely to deliver future messages from your domain and IP into their inbox. This makes it extremely important to make sure that subscribers are receiving email content they actually want and on an expected schedule established upon signing up for your email list.

Limiting Negative Metrics

High levels of user spam complaints and hard bounces can be the quickest way to go from good IP/domain reputation to bad. Spam complaints at high levels (> 0.3%) give email providers indicators that a marketer is potentially sending unsolicited content, which is a violation of CAN-Spam or CASL regulations . Marketers observed exhibiting this type of behavior will lose trust in the eyes of ISPs, which will typically result in very poor inbox placement levels.

When ISPs observe spikes in hard bounce levels this often raises questions about the marketer's list collection and hygiene (or cleaning) processes. Purchasing or using third party lists can often result in high levels of hard bounces based on the fact that many of these types of subscribers are un-verified. Many companies that provide these types of lists use web-scraping tools to gather email addresses from all over the Internet (many of which are spam traps), and they sell them to marketers that are looking to grow their client base. This is a huge ‘No-No' in the eyes of an ISP and will often result in drops in your reputation.

Sending to older segments of subscribers can also show spikes in hard bounce levels. A general rule of thumb is that if a subscriber or list hasn't been sent to in over a year, it's best to get rid of that group. While this can be a scary thought, as many marketers never want to throw away subscribers, we have to remember that ISPs value quality over quantity.

We have to always look at the big picture here. Sending to an older list may provide you with a small amount of conversions, but if it results in all of your Gmail subscribers receiving their email in their spam folder going forward, is it really worth it?

Authentication

ConvertKit offers assistance in setting up your SPF and DKIM records to align with sending through our platform. Whether you're sending your email through convertkit.com or through a custom domain setup (ck.yourdomain.com), we look to make sure that emails sent through your account show ‘Passes' for SPF and DKIM authentication levels.

Before an ISP delivers an email they first examine the email headers of that message, looking for permission for your domain to be sent across our IP addresses. If the SPF and DKIM records show failures within the message headers, your domain does not give permission for it to be sent across any of the IPs that are not stated within these records.

Here’s how it works:

By default when you get started with ConvertKit, you're sending on one of our sending domains. It usually looks something like ckmail2, 3, 4, etc. We have about five of these spread out among customers so multiple ConvertKit customers can be using the same sending domain. There are both benefits and disadvantages to how this affects you and your email deliverability.

If you're just starting to build your domain's reputation, using a sending domain other customers are using and have been using is a great thing. It quickly helps build up your reputation. However, it is possible that the consequences of another customer's poor sending practices can impact you negatively.

We have a lot of controls in place to prevent that from happening and we regularly redistribute our customers across our sending domains, but it’s still possible that a shared sending domain will negatively affect your deliverability.

For our customers who are most serious about deliverability, we offer a custom sending domain that allows you to rely solely on your own domain reputation. To find out more about custom sending domains and how to set one up, contact our Customer Success team.

Content

Your content plays a big role in how an email is delivered as well. Think of a typical newsletter you receive from a retailer, like Target or Bed, Bath and Beyond. They usually contain a ton of pictures with really complex HTML that almost mimics visiting their webpage in your browser. When Gmail sees messages like this, with primarily images and complex HTML, they will often filter it as a promotional email. At Convertkit, we put a major emphasis on simple emails like the ones you write to a friend, which helps us avoid those promo filters.

Simple, plain text emails are more likely to be delivered into a primary inbox, period. Even though we recommend sending plain text emails to improve your deliverability, there still aren't any absolute changes that can be made to guarantee inbox placement within the Primary Tab.

Recent studies have shown that the usage of Gmail Tabs has dropped to roughly 33% (a 66% decrease in users since 2013). The prevailing thought here is that this filtering will have less of an impact going forward because those Gmail users that are savvy enough to set this up are usually the same users that will routinely check these folders.

Now that you know what affects email deliverability, let’s increase your chances of hitting those primary inboxes, shall we? The four high level deliverability concepts we’ve covered can be broken down into actionable, daily takeaways. Here’s how…

10 email deliverability best practices

Email deliverability doesn’t have to be rocket science. There are very easy practices you can put into action every day and with every email you send to help increase your deliverability chances. Here are 10 (easily actionable) email deliverability best practices.

Don’t buy lists (Seriously, don’t be THAT lady)

Like I said earlier, purchasing and using third party lists will result in high levels of hard bounce based on the fact that many of these types of subscribers are un-verified. So while you have a big list of, let’s say 50,000 subscribers right up front, the trouble is that they didn’t choose to be on your list. A vast majority of those emails will go straight to the SPAM folder, many more will mark them as SPAM once they’re opened, and then another large number will unsubscribe immediately. So even if you’re left with a few thousand in the end, they aren’t people who are choosing to hear from you.

Create opt-in incentives that attract the right subscribers

Some opt-in offers are better than others when it comes to building an email list full of qualified subscribers. For example, because giveaways and freebies attract a wide range of people, you’ll most likely get a high volume of signups that will never open your later emails or might even move them to their spam folder. Their negative engagement can eventually end up sending your emails to other subscriber’s spam folders as well.

To combat this, make sure your opt-ins are always targeted to an audience that would be interested in your topic. You always want to be attracting readers who would likely open your emails and eventually become customers.

So if you’re planning on running a contest with giveaways, make sure you’re setting yourself up for the outcome. If you’re wanting to grow your list with a targeted audeince, create a giveaway that only that group will want. Or if you just want to get your name out there and build a large list, create a giveaway that will appeal to a wide audience.

Use simple design (Or none at all)

Like I said earlier in the content section, simple emails will always deliver better. Even when it comes to images or tables in your emails, too many will decrease your deliverability. You can read more about our theory on why text-based emails are the way to increase your email deliverability in our post Why Fancy Email Templates Aren’t the Answer.

Add alt text when you use images

Images in and of themselves are not bad. Everyone loves a beautiful picture or graphic and they often help convey a thought or point quicker than actual text. But when you use an image, make sure to write accurate alt text or title instead of simply using the image’s file name. This way if an image gets blocked for any reason, a reader will still know what your image is. This also helps prove that a human sent the email instead of a spam robot.

How to- After you’ve added an image to your email in ConvertKit, click the image again and then click the edit button that pops up. In the edit box, write a title for that image that describes what is happening in your image, ie- your call to action, the details of a promotion.

Watch out for these trigger words

Sadly, because of those spammers out there, there are some words that have developed a bad wrap. When used in subject lines for emails, these trigger words can signal the possibility of spam and usually will send an email straight to the abyss. Here are a couple of those words to avoid in your email subject lines (and your content, if you can):

• Free
• Financial freedom
• Make money online
• Credit card offer
• Cash bonus
• Apply now
• $$$
• Weight loss
• Order now
• Price
• Increase sales

Enable double opt-in for all new subscribers

Setting up the double opt-in process adds an extra layer of subscriber qualification for you. If a subscriber clicks through a double opt-in:

• You can confirm every subscriber so your list is more accurate. That means if there's a typo in their entry they won't end up clogging up your list with email addresses that will ultimately fail.
• They are confirming interest and are more likely to open your emails in the long run, which improves your deliverability rankings.
• You know they are not fake subscribers and spammers with false email addresses that can ultimately affect your monthly fees.

With ConvertKit, setting up a double opt-in process is as easy as clicking a button.

Set up a custom sending domain

Again, setting up a custom domain for your reply-to email address will increase your deliverability. That means your days of using freemail like Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo are over. Learn how to setup your custom sending domain with ConvertKit: contact our amazing Customer Success team.

Keep a clean list

No matter how exciting or targeted your content is, there will always be a group of subscribers who aren’t engaged with your emails. Since those unopens can affect your email deliverability, it’s a good idea to run a re-engagement email sequence every 90 days to filter out what we call cold subscribers. Cleaning out your subscriber list will help it be healthy and high quality (plus, you’ll save money).

Ask subscribers to move emails from their spam or promo folder to their inbox

Sometimes email to new subscribers end up in their spam folder for reasons beyond your control. If those subscribers end up getting in contact with you asking where the email went, ask them to check their spam folder and take a second to move that email from the spam folder to their inbox. It might sound like a silly request, but doing this teaches that ESP that your email actually belongs in the inbox. Doing this will not only help with that particular subscriber's emails, but it will also help similar users whose emails might be ending up in spam as well.

Optimize your email subject lines

The last thing I want to mention that often gets mistaken for a deliverability issue is the subject line. While a subject line could potentially impact deliverability, it has it's greatest impact on engagement. A subject line is the first and sometimes only thing a subscriber reads of your email. If it doesn't clearly communicate what the email is going to be about and entice them to open it, then they won’t. Subject lines are often the simplest thing to tweak that have the greatest impact on opens and clicks.

Tools you can use to help check your email deliverability

Ready to start increasing your chances of optimized email deliverability? To find out where you stand right now, there are a couple tools you can check out. MailTester and GlockApps both test against Spam Assassin to tell you how your emails are delivering.

Once you’ve got that information you can start putting all those email deliverability best practices I talked about into place. Then it’s time to watch those clicks and conversion rate numbers rise.

Deliverability Terms Cheat Sheet

Blacklist-This is a list of IP addresses of known spammers, or “spam friendly” servers. If your IP address is on the list, it won't let your email through.

CAN-Spam – Short for ‘Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003,' this law outlines rules for commercial email, establishes requirements for commercial messages, provides email recipients with the right to make you stop emailing them, and lays out consequences for violations of the Act.

CASL regulations- This is Canada’s anti-spam legislation. It’s similar to CAN-SPAM in that it protects consumers against receiving unwanted email but different in that it is much more specific about permission and what is considered “opt-in”.

Domain– Similar to an IP Address, domain names refer to locations of servers and devices connected to the Internet. Domain names can represent many different IP addresses.

Domain Name System (DNS)- DNS is an Internet service that translates domain names into IP addresses.

Domainkeys Identified Mail (DKIM)- DKIM was designed to prevent domain spoofing, or someone pretending to send from your email domain, when they really aren't. DKIM uses cryptographic authentication, which means the records we generate will be unique to you and your domain. Read more about DKIM here.

Double opt-in– With a double opt-in a user is sent an email with a confirmation link after they initially opt-in to your list. After the user clicks the link, they are added to the ongoing email communication. This is a recommended way to build a healthy email marketing list.

Email service provider (ESP)- ESPs provide platforms to send commercial and transactional email on your behalf. ConvertKit is an ESP.

Hard bounce–  A hard bounce means that the email address is invalid and should not be sent to again. The email might belong to an unknown user, the content of your email might have triggered their spam filter, or the server might have seen too many other contacts marking your email as spam. When a contact’s email returns a hard bounce, they will be marked as ineligible the next time you include them in a send.

Internet Service Providers (ISP)- ISPs provide mailboxes to end users as part of their paid services. These are generally your cable or Internet providers, such as Comcast and Verizon.

IP Address- A number that uniquely identifies any device connected to the Internet. “IP” stands for “Internet Protocol.” Similar to how a street address helps people find buildings, an IP Address helps computers find each other on the Internet.

Open rate- The percentage of recipients who opened your email message. When someone clicks on an email, an image pixel in the email loads and is counted as an open.

Sender Policy Framework (SPF)- SPF was specifically created to protect against sender address forgery – spammers pretending to send emails as you. An SPF record in your DNS Settings gives email providers something to check, to make sure the emails are really coming from you. Read more about SPF here.

Sender score/reputation- This is basically your rating as an email sender. Return Path’s sender score tool is a free reputation rating tool that rates your outgoing mail server IP on a scale of 0-100. It’s used by mail servers, allowing them to quickly sort email IPs and decide what to do with your email. A sender score that is + 90 is considered a good sender score.

Single opt-in– If an email marketer uses a single opt-in, this usually involves taking a user's form entry and immediately adding that person to a live email list.

Soft Bounce – A soft bounce means that the email temporarily failed to reach its intended recipient. The email will be resent for up to 72 hours or until it’s either successfully delivered or it fails more permanently. Recipients that return soft bounces will still be eligible for future email sends.

Spam complaints (Marked as Spam)- This is the number of contacts that actively marked your email as spam. Contacts that mark your email as spam are automatically unsubscribed from all of your email. Please be aware that Marked as Spam is not the same as an email going into a spam or bulk email folder.

Spam trap/Honeypot– A planted email address designed to catch spammers. For a time, email that hits a dead email address will return a hard bounce. When the mail server sees continued traffic going to the dead address, it can turn the email into a spam trap, accept the email, and report the sender as a spammer.

Whitelist– The opposite of a blacklist, this means your server is considered spam-free or is an “approved sender.” It’s often used by email applications to allow users to mark whether or not they trust emails from specific senders, this overrides some of the filtering that may exist from the ISP. You can also apply for whitelisting programs that a few ISPs offer. While not a guarantee to end up in the inbox, a sender may receive preferred delivery as long as they stay within the proper thresholds of the program.

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