Here’s what you need to know about email marketing & the Danger Zone
Video available on my Expert-Velocity YouTube channel
So, if you’re a business chances are you’re probably using email to communicate with your clients. You’re on your prospects right? Now I feel like emails are really hugely outdated piece of technology but let’s not go there. Let’s just assume for a moment that you’re using email to communicate with your clients.
Now do you know what your open rate is?
Now actually, this will be a really good time to go and check that. If it’s 20 plus percent, then awesome. You’ve got this CRAT, we’re going to hit stop. You don’t need to watch this anymore. If you’re getting towards 7%, 6%, 5% open rates, then there’s an issue, right?
Good ol’ days
So, in the good old days, I’m going back I don’t know, 20, 30, 40 years, maybe. I don’t know when emails was first come around, there was an ISP that was acting as a gateway. That was going to decide if your email got through or not. Right. And they would basically look at where that message was coming from, the IP address, and they’ll decide a very binary let’s let through or let’s not. And people often think in a same sort of ways now.
Now it’s much more complicated. So, let me jump forward. I’m going to show you this image here.
So, this image here shows the pathway of your message. You can see there’s lots of different gateways now. So, the decision for the IP will look at the IP address and they may blacklist you and therefore your email may not get through. From the domain it’s coming from that may sort of effectively blacklist you and stop your messages getting through. Spam detected because of the content inside your message may effectively act as a blacklist and stop your messages getting through.
But most importantly is this last point.
And I think many people are not aware of this. Its actually the previous engagement that you’ve had with that recipient. That is what’s going to really decide if your message gets through.
Now what does that mean?
Big issue
That means if you’ve got somebody on your maybe I use Active Campaign to host and manage all my database, that’s how I send messages out to people on mass. Communicate with them. If I have somebody in my database that hasn’t opened perhaps of any of the five previous messages, maybe they’ve not opened any emails I’ve sent in the last three, four, or five or more months, chances are every email programme out there is going to mark that message as spam because they can see that recipient is not responding to your messages.
Now that’s not a great loss, right? Because well if they never responded anyway, there’s not much you can do about it. Not a great loss but there is.
If your email provider or their email provider sees that only 7% or less are actually engaging with your messages, then you go into a whole new category. That means you’ve got somebody new that’s never engaged with you before, perhaps they’re signing up for your product for prospects for the very first time.
Email behaviour
They’ll look at your previous behaviour and go, well this is probably a bit of spam. I’m going to whack this message straight into spam, even though there’s nothing in the content that says it’s spammy. Even though the IP address is good, even the domain it’s coming from is good because there’s other people on your list that aren’t engaging with you, we’re going to automatically blacklist this and put it into the spam folder. That’s a pretty big deal.
All right. So, what this little video is basically a shout-out for you to take some ownership of that. Now I know and I’ve done this in the past, right? Well I’m really out of control if something ends up in somebody’s spam folder.
You are in control of delivery rates
That’s not really true and actually not really fair. And actually we do need to take a bit more ownership of this. So, look at your list. If there’s people not responding there, get rid of them, leave them off your database. You remove your 50 worst people, people won’t engage with you anyway, suddenly that 5% of responses now turns into 10% of response, which means a new prospect does get your message. Doesn’t end up in the spam folder.
That could be a dramatic difference for our business. So, this just a little shout out just to raise a little bit of awareness of this issue around email marketing, that a lot of people are not aware of and I wanted to pass it on to you.
So, I hope that helps take a little look at that. Almost said that correctly didn’t I. Take a little look at that and again, if you’re sort of 15 plus percent, 10% plus, you’re fine. You’re probably going to be absolutely fine. You’ve got a very high chance of that email getting through, assuming there’s no spammy content in there, assuming your domain is good, assuming your IP is good.
Avoid the Danger-Zone
But if you’re in this 7%, 6%, 5%, that’s when you get into often considered the danger zone and that can have big repercussions for anybody else in your list.
Okay. That’s it from me. Over and out.
You can contact me here.
Do you have any email marketing tips – you’re willing to share?
