5 practical ways to improve email deliverability

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THIS WEEK’S LESSON

5 practical ways to improve email deliverability

A week or so ago I was speaking with my friend Jenn, who runs a successful company called The Main Idea.

She told me about a recent email that had problems landing in her audience’s inbox.

Her jam is reading great books and articles and summarizing the key points for her readers. Helping people achieve a result they want faster is a winning business idea.

The problem: she read and created her 1-pager for Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation — which set off alarm bells and landed the email her audience was expecting in the spam folder.

Not good.

Why did her email land in jail?

The book discusses self-harm and Jenn wrote about it.

District internet filters are aggressive. Kind of like an amp that goes to eleven.

Later on the call, Jenn even mentioned writing about 🥜 allergies which also impacted her email deliverability.

So I wanted to write about that subject today, to help make sure your newsletter lands in your audience’s inboxes.

Here are my 5 tips …

Tip #1: 1st appearances matter

Mr. Beast allegedly spends up to $10K on the thumbnail of a video. The click to engage is everything.

How much time or cash do you invest in your subject lines?

Being able to send email at scale with a few clicks makes Former Educator Founders lazy.

• Stand out in the inbox by crafting subject lines that people can’t wait to open.

• Add a bit of context or personality to the preview line.

Laura Belgray writes great subject lines and preview text:

Tip #2: Create epic content

Now that your reader has opened your email, the real battle begins.

Keeping attention.

edupreneur.ing is a new project for me, but I’m thinking deeply how to deliver the best ROI on each word I write.

• Words that encourage momentum through the newsletter

• Insights that are helpful to Former Educator Founders

• Practical tactics readers can apply and get an immediate result

So far I like what I’m seeing:

Focus on delivering high-quality content to your audience and you’ll have no problem landing in people’s inboxes.

Tip #3: Avoid trigger words

I’m not talking bringing up politics so your uncle can start sharing conspiracy theories at Thanksgiving.

There are trigger words that Google and the rest of email providers will scan for. Here’s a good list of words to avoid (from Hubspot).

Tip #4: Clean your list

There are 4,290 people who subscribed to learn how Ruckus Makers Do School Different. 505 of those individuals are considered cold subscribers — meaning they haven’t opened an email in the lsat few weeks.

So I put them all in a sequence that basically goes like this:

• Subscriber tagged and added to re-engagement sequence

• Subscriber gets 3 “Are we breaking up?” type emails

• Subscriber has opportunity to click a link to stay on the list

• And if they don’t click, I will delete them in a week.

It can be hard to see that 505 people are considered cold on my list. But the fact is they weren’t engaging and never would have benefitted from what we offer at Ruckus Maker HQ anyway.

• If you use Beehiiv, do this to clean your list.

• If you use (Convert)Kit, do this to clean your list.

• If you use Mailchimp, do this to clean your list.

• If you use something else, good luck 😉

Cleaning your list will automatically increase engagement and promote a healthy email list 🎉

Tip #5: Compress images

Images impact email load times. The bigger the pic the longer the load time.

The longer the load time, the worse the reader experience.

And that gets you knocked into spam.

So compress your images using a tool like TinyPNG.

That’s it.

Today we covered 5-ways to improve your email deliverability:

1. Write engaging subject lines and preview text

2. Create epic content

3. Avoid trigger words

4. Clean your list

5. Compress images

Good luck landing in the inbox this week 📧

If you want to dive deeper into the subject, check out Zero Bounce’s ultimate guide to email deliverability.