Tag: Marketing

Guest post by Leah Monica, Director of Marketing

We all constantly hear about email marketing best practices to help increase our open and click rates – subject lines, concise copy, clear calls-to-actions – but what good are those best practices if our emails aren’t even reaching your contacts’ inboxes?

Why do your emails sometimes get blocked? Here’s a quick rundown on some things that can affect email delivery:

Email delivery is best for personal emails sent from one person to another person. Not surprising, right? From there, delivery rates start to go down when you send to larger groups of people, specifically when you’re sending to 20+ individuals per email, or when you use any type of list or bulk email platform.

On top of that, there are also a variety of filters that catch or reject mail, for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s because people are marking your email as spam (more on that another time!), but sometimes corporate filters simply decide that too much mail has come from one particular group/IP and they cut it off for fear of spam or malicious intent. For example, if you sent a message to 100 people at one of your member companies, 20 of them may get it while 80 do not.

So what can you do? Here are some immediate solutions that may help:

• Ask your members to ask their IT groups to whitelist your organization, either by domain (including anything from any of your subdomains) or by IP address.
• Remind your members to not mark your messages as spam or junk, but to simply unsubscribe or contact you if they want help getting off some of your lists.
• Watch the amount of email you are sending out. Don’t make them want to press the ‘junk’ button. Also be careful not to make your subject lines sound spammy.
• Beware of attachment sizes! Some corporate groups block emails with attachments as small as 5MB.

One of our biggest tips is to have someone on staff look at your email delivery reports each week, and follow up on a few email addresses that are marked as hard or soft bounces. i.e., call that person or the primary contact of that organization, and confirm people/email addresses. This is also a good time to ask if they can whitelist you! A couple of our clients systematically do this, and they report it is a good way to chat with the members casually, in addition to keeping their database clean. Wins all around!

A couple of weeks ago, I sent out an important message to my entire staff about IT support. We had recently put in some technologies to make it easier for staff to request IT support during business and non-business hours, and some of our procedures had changed. The subject line began with PLEASE READ, and it came directly from me, Joanna Pineda, CEO and the person who signs everyone’s paycheck.

The email was longish so I decided to do a test. At the very bottom of the email, I wrote:

“BTW, if you read all the way down to this message, send me an email with the words “banana bread” in the subject line. I’ll bring in banana bread for you next week and for God’s sake, don’t give this away on Slack or any other method. Curious to see how many people will read this message. Cheers.”

So how many people sent me a banana bread email? Out of 40 people, seven people sent me emails. Seven – that’s it!

To be fair, the IT team already knew the procedures. And I had discussed the procedures with a few staff before sending the emails.

During staff meeting last week, I asked everyone if they had: read but not responded, skimmed and not read my banana bread message, or if they didn’t read the message at all. I gave everyone amnesty if they told me the truth. I got these responses:

• I already know the policies
• I skimmed the part about the policies to make sure I knew what I needed to know
• Too long, didn’t read
• I don’t like banana bread
• I didn’t see the email

I conducted a similar experiment a couple of months back when I sent an email to my son’s Cub Scout pack, of which I’m the committee chair. The email contained information about the next pack meeting, an upcoming camping trip… Yada, yada – if you’re a Scout parent, you understand me. At the bottom, I said:

“Okay, thanks for reading this far. If you got this far, email me and put the word “magnet” in the subject line and I’ll give you a Friends of Scouting magnet at the next meeting.”

Out of 60 people on the list, three responded. Two said they’d take a magnet and one said, “Magnet – but I don’t need a magnet. What fun!”

I know this wasn’t a scientific test, and the emails weren’t life or death, but I think these experiments are pretty illustrative of what really happens when we send out emails. We look at our open and click rates and pray that those who opened actually read the message. Are they actually reading your message in its entirety? God, most likely not.

What are the takeaways here? For starters:

• Keep your emails short(er)
• Don’t bury important calls to action at the bottom of your message
• Test your campaigns

If you’ve read all the way to the bottom of this blog post, submit a comment on this post using the word SWAG, and I’ll send a Matrix Group pen to the first 25 people. And if you decide to bury an Easter Egg in your next email newsletter, please write the results of your experiment in the comments as well or send me an email.