• Addressing your subscribers by their names;
• Customizing the body of your email based on their activity on your site (such as adding a specific product to their cart) or by making note of things users have told you about themselves, including their age, gender, or location.

Because subscribers are more likely to interact with emails that have been customized and don’t appear to be mass mailings, personalizing your emails, you gain a better reputation with email providers (since they see that users are not ignoring or marking your emails as spam). Additionally, you build relationships with your users, which leads to a higher return on your marketing investment.

How to Personalize Your Emails’ Subject

You can personalize the subject lines of your emails to capture your readers’ attention immediately. To do this, open up the template for the email you want to personalize.

Next to the Subject line, click Personalize subject to display the list of fields for which you may include. You may choose from the following subscriber fields:

• Email address;
• Name;
• Subscription date.

You may also choose to include the title of the first item in an RSS field instead of a subscriber field.

Once you’ve chosen the personalization field you want to include, click to include its alias. For example, if you want to include the subscriber’s email address, you’ll see your subject line includes %Subscriber:EmailAddress%.

You can edit around this alias. For example, you might want your subject line to say, “Welcome! Your email address is name@example.com!” The subject line in your template would therefore be Welcome! Your email address is %Subscriber:EmailAddress%!

How to Personalize Your Emails’ Body

In addition to personalizing the subject of your emails, you can personalize the body of your emails. To do this, open up the template for the email you want to personalize.

Click on the part of the body you want to personalize. You will be presented with an Options toolbar.

Click on Merge Tags to display the dropdown listing the fields you may include. Select the alias you want to include in your email.

You may edit around this alias. For example, to display “Welcome to our email, NAME”, you would include Welcome to our email, %Subscriber:CustomField1%.

The post Your How-to Guide to Email Content Personalization in Sendloop appeared first on Sendloop.

Remote Content functionality is currently available for welcome auto-responder and marketing automation messages. It will be available for email marketing campaigns soon.

Step 1: Merge tags

When creating your subscription welcome auto-responder or marketing automation message, simply click “Merge Tags” drop list on the message toolbar and click “Insert remote content” option:

Step 2: Update your URL

A special merge tag will be inserted into your email content. Edit the merge tag and replace the dummy content URL with the correct URL.

To send recipient data to your content URL, simply add personalization merge tags into the content URL. Here’s an example:

The post Remote Content Feature in Sendloop & How to Use It appeared first on Sendloop.

DNS Records

Setting up email authentication requires you to work with DNS records, but don’t worry if you’ve never done so. This article will cover in detail all of the steps you need to perform.

Email authentication is a way to prove that your email isn’t a forgery. More specifically, it involves granting permissions to Sendloop to send email on behalf of your domain (for example, if your site’s URL were http://www.example.com, your domain is example.com). With authentication, email providers know that the incoming email is valid and isn’t a disguise for spam (doing this is a process known as phishing).

Because spam is so prevalent, Internet service providers (ISPs) and other email servers are using authentication to control the inflow. As such, it’s important that you take steps to authenticate your emails.

Heads Up!

Without email authentication, you’ll see a poor inbox delivery rate.

Types of Email Authentication

Sendloop supports use of two types of email authentication:

• Sender Policy Framework (SPF): When you use SPF, you provide a list of IP addresses that you use to send emails. Email providers, upon receiving your emails, look at the IP address that sent the emails and compare it to your list. If there is a match, it delivers the email. If not, it flags it as spam.
• DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM): When you use DKIM, there are two “keys” that correspond to your site. One is public, and it can be seen by anyone. The other is private, and only your website’s servers know what it is. When you send an email, your email server embeds your private key in your email so that receiving email providers can compare the two keys to make sure that the message is from who it claims to be and that it hasn’t been tampered with during sending.

How do I set up email authentication?

To set up email authentication, you’ll need to implement two changes to your DNS records. Sendloop’s email authorization wizard can help you identify the changes you need to make.

Using the Email Authorization Wizard

After logging in to your Sendloop account, click Settings in the top navigation bar.

On the Settings page, click Sender Domain Authentication. If this is the first time you’ve done this, you’ll see the Authenticated Sender Domains* page. Click on Authenticate Sender Domain to proceed.

When prompted, provide your domain. Click Add Domain to proceed.

Once you’ve provided Sendloop with your domain, you’ll be redirected to the Domain Control Panel. This page shows you which records you need to update/add.

Need help?

If you need help modifying your DNS records, reach out to your network administrator. If you do not have one, contact your web hosting service for assistance. You can click on the Send setup instructions to your server admin link to provide them with the information relevant to your Sendloop account.

Set Up the SPF Record

To add an SPF record for your domain, you’ll need to create one using any plain text editor, such as Notepad. The only text you’ll need to include in the file is the value provided on your Domain Control Panel, which looks like this:

v=spf1 a mx include:sendloop-1.com include:spf.qpostie.com ~all

Update an existing SPF record

If you already have an SPF record for your domain, simply add include:sendloop-1.com in between v=spf1 and ~all.

Set Up the DKIM Record

To add a DKIM record for your domain, you’ll need to create one called sl._domainkey using a plain text editor (such as Notepad).

Within the sl._domainkey file, include the DKIM signature provided in the Value column of the row indicating that you’re missing a DKIM record. The signature looks something like this:

v=DKIM1; k=rsa; p=MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GNADCBiQKBgQC8A2AmheQxbskyETU6wx/ FQHZDo4E9/UlTzmqW/BRcdN73WhSL5mAQ/hyyk9hbSPVbgdwm8VFl1GYfoMildmEe4p J45MHSc4PUWpzcevr2+5g9YoxzGvuJp8NjwScvFRz4gSsVu5SYo0sJdO2xvO+TKaZTtH 0D+Z6driUc3vQuWQIDAQAB;

OPTIONAL: Set Up the CNAME Record

While this step is optional, we recommend adding a CNAME record. This allows you to alias the links used in your email message. For example, if you use docs.example.com, you might add documents.example.com as a pointed to docs.example.com. Doing so results in consistency that boosts your inbox delivery rate.

To add a CNAME record, create a file using a plain text editor (such as Notepad), that contains the value displayed in the Domain Control Panel. It will look something like this:

c1f5903-4cead6.tracker.sndlp.com

Check Your Authentication Set Up

Once you have implemented the appropriate DNS record changes, you can click Check DNS Records on the Domain Control Panel to test your changes. Sendloop will verify your DNS records, and if everything works, the red warning flags will disappear.

DNS changes may take several hours to propagate, so if you don’t see an immediate change, try again at a later time.

The post Your Guide to Email Authentication with Sendloop appeared first on Sendloop.

A lot of times, old or stale email addresses are the cause of high levels of these metrics. To reduce the incidence of these events, you can clean your subscriber lists.

What are stale email addresses?

Stale email addresses are those that have been on your list for a long time, but the recipient no longer opens, reads, or clicks on your links.

What is list cleaning?

List cleaning is the act of providing one or more of your subscriber list to an email verification service (such as Kickbox or Hunter. This service then tells you which addresses are least likely to be successful. You are then responsible for removing the addresses from your list (generally speaking, the email verification service does not do this for your).

Why should I clean my list?

By cleaning your list, you remove the addresses of those who are no longer interested in your emails, as well as the addresses that no longer work. You’ll reduce the number of hard bounces and spam complaints due to your email campaigns, which keeps Sendloop from flagging your account for prohibited activity.

Additionally, email providers keep track of activity originating from you. Spam-like behavior from you negatively affects your reputation, making it more likely that your messages get caught in spam filters (regardless of whether your emails are legitimate or not).

The post Are You Cleaning Your Subscriber Lists? Here’s Why You Should appeared first on Sendloop.

Sendloop’s email delivery infrastructure automatically assigns delivery-related IP addresses to each user account based on factors including (but not limited to):

• Email list size
• Volume of deliveries
• Frequency of deliveries
• Recipient engagement scores
• Sender’s domain age

Please contact us at any time if:

• You would like additional information on whether a shared pool or a dedicated IP address better fits your needs;
• We have assigned your account to a pool with shared IP addresses, but you need a dedicated IP address.

The post Dedicated Delivery IP Addresses appeared first on Sendloop.

While using HTML to design your emails allows you great flexibility and creativity, you should still implement a plain text version of your email.

What is a plain text email?

Plain text emails are simple messages that contain no images, fonts, or hyperlinks.

Why are plain text emails important?

By including both the HTML and plain text versions of your emails, you increase the number of people to whom your emails reach.

Plain text emails are not as attractive as HTML-based emails, but they are important for the following reasons:

• Because HTML-only emails are a red flag for spam filters, including a plain text alternative to your HTML-based message increases the likelihood that your email gets delivered to the recipient.
• Not all email clients and apps support HTML. Though this scenario is somewhat uncommon, email providers that do not support HTML will render the plain text alternative if it’s available. This ensures that a larger number of people can see your message.

The post Plain Text Email appeared first on Sendloop.

Adding a Subscriber List to a Group

Navigate to the Subscriber Management page by clicking on Subscribers after logging into the Sendloop Dashboard.

Identify the list you want to be added to a group, and click on Options on the bottom right of its box. On the drop-down menu, click on Move lists to a group.

If you don’t currently have any groups, you’ll be asked to create one. All you need to provide is a name for the list.

If you have one or more groups already, you can choose to Move to a new group (which then requires you to provide a name for the new group) or Move to an existing group (which requires you to select the existing group to which you want the list moved).

Click Move to move the list into the appropriate group.

The post Grouping Subscriber Lists appeared first on Sendloop.

Implement Email Authentication

Email authentication proves that your message came from who it says it come from and that it’s legitimate. By adding DKIM and SPF records to your Sendloop account, you can increase the likelihood of your email reaching your recipients.

Focus on Your Most Engaged Subscribers

Many email providers look carefully at how much people engage with your emails–Do they open your emails? Do they click on the links you provide? Do they mark them as spam, or do they add you to their whitelist? To maximize your emails’ deliverability, you want your engagement score (which measures your users’ engagement with your emails) as high as possible. Here are some ways you can do that.

Engage in List Hygiene

Email list hygiene is important because it ensures that you’re only using addresses that you should be. You can use email validation services (such as Data Validation or BriteVerify) to make sure that all of the addresses are valid, which reduces the number of hard bounces. You can also send opt-in reminders to your subscribers periodically; those who respond are particularly interested in the content you’re sending and are therefore more likely to engage with your emails.

List Hygiene Services

• Quick Email Verification
• BriteVerify
• Data Validation
• Kickbox

Implement Double Opt-in

To keep your email lists “clean”, you can also implement double opt-in. This means that, to subscribe to your emails, your users have to provide their email address and then confirm their subscription by email. This ensures that only the most interested viewers end up on your lists.

Deliver High-Quality Content

Focus on delivering high-quality content, especially since spam filters have gotten quite strong and can parse text the way humans would. Take note on how you’re handling the following things to make sure that your email doesn’t get caught by spam filters:

• Check your HTML using a linter, such as Dirty Markup, to ensure that your code isn’t broken;
• Don’t include links from blacklisted domains;
• Keep your text to image ratio small, since a lot of images tends to indicate a spammer attempting to bypass the parsing abilities of a spam filter.

Minimize Complaints

You might still receive complaints even if you only include confirmed, opted-in subscribers in your campaigns. They may have forgotten that they chose to subscribe, or they may have changed their mind as to whether they want to receive your messages or not. However, you can reduce spam complaints by doing the following:

• Make the unsubscribe link prominent in your email;
• Handle unsubscribe requests promptly (and remove the users who complain about your emails!);
• Add a sentence or two at the top of your body reminding readers that they have opted-in to your emails;
• Ensure that your content is related to your subject line (and vice versa);
• Think through your email frequency–does it match what subscribers expect?

By using the techniques discussed above, you can greatly improve the deliverability rate of your email campaigns. However, if you need additional assistance, please feel free to contact us.

The post Maximizing Inbox Delivery Success appeared first on Sendloop.

You have an incorrect/missing SPF and DKIM setup

Adding correct and valid SPF and DKIM records to your Sendloop account proves that your emails aren’t forgeries and are coming from a legitimate sender. Without these records set up appropriately, email providers might flag your messages as ones coming from spammers.

The domain you’re sending from has been blacklisted

Sometimes, email providers blacklist IP addresses (or, in drastic cases, blocks of IP addresses) they think are being used by spammers. If the domain you’re sending from has been blacklisted, none of your emails will be delivered to your recipients’ inboxes. You can easily check to see if your domain has been blacklisted.

Your recipient engagement levels are low

One of the metrics used by email providers to determine whether you are a legitimate sender or not is your recipient engagement level. This is a measure of how much users interact with your emails (opening the message, clicking on its links, responding to the sender, and so on), and providers assume that senders with low scores are spammers.

There are many ways of increasing your recipient engagement levels, but some key factors include:

• Sending from an email address that has a monitored inbox, rather than an address like no-reply@example.com;
• Including your contact information (including name, address, email address, and phone numbers);
• Providing valuable content your readers are interested in so that they will click through on your emails.

Your subject line is low quality

Crafting a good subject line is very important since it’s what leads your users to open up your messages. However, you also need to make sure that your strong subject line accurately reflects the content of your messages–misleading subjects will eventually leads to declining levels of clicks. This lead to an overall decline in user engagement, indicating to email providers that your messages aren’t of interest to their users and might be better off delivered to spam folders.

Your recipients don’t find your emails relevant or they find them low in quality

First, ensure that your emails’ content reflects the subject line (and vice versa). Users may see discrepancies as a bait-and-switch, leading them to view your emails negatively.

Secondly, if the content you include in your emails doesn’t interest your recipients or aren’t relevant to their interests, they will be less inclined to read your messages. Over time, they may not even open your emails. All of this adds up to a low recipient engagement level, which, as we covered above, leads to a greater chance your messages get caught up in spam filters. Be sure to provide valuable content to your users; don’t just email for the sake of emailing!

Your hard bounce rates are high

Hard bounces occur when your messages are permanently rejected due to issues with the email address(es) you’re using. Not only do email providers track hard bounces, but Sendloop also does as well, since using email lists resulting in a high number of hard bounces is a key sign that a sender is a spammer. There are ways to reduce your level of hard bounces, including using a list verification service, using double opt-in, and so on.

The post Emails Delivered to Spam Folders appeared first on Sendloop.

What’s the difference?

With single opt-in, you add subscribers to your mailing list as soon as he or she subscribes. There’s no further action the subscriber needs to take before receiving your emails.

With double opt-in, subscribers need to do two things before you add them to your mailing list:

• Provide their email addresses and indicate they want to subscribe;
• Confirm their subscriptions by clicking the appropriate link in a confirmation email they receive.

What are the upsides and downsides to using single opt-in?

Upsides

• Because users have to sign up for your list and confirm their signup, you know that they really want to be on your list. These users tend to have higher levels of engagement with your emails.
• You prevent spam addresses (fake addresses, addresses entered by a bot, etc.) from being added to your list. Not only does this mean you’ll see lower rates of things like hard bounces, you’ll keep your lists cleaner, making later maintenance (such as list cleaning) easier.

Downsides

• You might lose out on customers who don’t confirm their email addresses, even though they did sign up for your emails and want to receive them. Maybe they forgot to confirm, or the confirmation email got caught in their spam filter.
• You might seem spam-like, especially if the user receives a lot of emails from you soon after signing up. For example, someone might not be thrilled if you send a confirmation email, a welcome email, and your weekly email during the week after they’ve subscribed.

How to Switch Between Single and Double Opt-In When Using Sendloop

Sendloop makes it easy to implement either single or double opt-in lists. This option is managed on a per-list basis, so you can choose whichever makes the most sense for a given list.

To begin, navigate to your Subscribers page, where you will see all of the mailing lists associated with your Sendloop account.

Select the list you want to manage, and click its name. You’ll be directed to the list’s Overview page, where you can then click on Settings.

On the settings page, you can change the list’s Subscription mode.

You can choose between Subscribe immediately and Subscribe after double opt-in confirmation.

When done, click Save to persist your changes.

The post Single vs. Double Opt-in Subscriber Lists appeared first on Sendloop.

Keeping up-to-date on email marketing techniques and tactics allows you to separate your marketing from that of your competitors, which means higher open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. In this article, we will share the top 8 email marketing best practice tips, tricks, and ideas to help put your business ahead of your competitors. These include information on:

• Audience
• Single Opt-In vs. Double Opt-In
• Segmentation
• Engagement and Interaction
• Email Design in the Mobile Era
• Frequency and Timing
• Delivery Volume
• Email Delivery Infrastructure

Some of these are well-known but frequently fall by the wayside. The most successful email marketing campaigns are those that follow these simple but powerful email marketing practices.

Audience

Your audience is the most valuable asset in your business. Without it, you cannot make sales. In 2020, knowing and engaging with your audience is more important than anything else — in fact, it’s the key to your success in email marketing.

Firstly, never source your email address list from friends, third-party data providers, or websites. This is no longer an effective strategy. In fact, it’s actually harmful, with the potential to hurt your brand, deliverability, and domain. Your domains and delivery IP addresses are likely to be blacklisted, causing damage to your reputation that could take months to correct. A list of email addresses from a third-party source does not necessarily comprise an audience for your brand. In addition, sending irrelevant emails to uninterested recipients won’t bring you business.

If you don’t yet have an audience, it’s time to add a mail list subscription form to your website. Choose quality over quantity. A highly active list of 100 subscribers is much better than a passive list of 100,000. In 2020, it’s more important than ever to have a highly active audience that opens emails, follows links, and even sends replies. Gmail, Hotmail, and other major email services have the capability to monitor interactions with your email recipients.

Start by putting a mail list subscription form on your website and giving away incentives in exchange for your site visitors’ email addresses. Run Facebook campaigns to reach potential clients on social media. Don’t forget to collect additional information about your site visitors. The more information you have about your audience, the better you can provide tailored services and conduct a more successful email marketing campaign in 2020.

If your mailing list is several years old, it may be time for an update. Make sure email addresses are current. Over time, email accounts are deactivated, and inactive accounts turn into spam traps. Even a small group of invalid email addresses or spam traps may cause damage to your delivery reputation. There are several email verification services available, such as Kickbox and QuickEmailVerification. If your business uses Sendloop, a one-click integration will make sure your data is verified.

Single Opt-In vs. Double Opt-In

One of the most important but undervalued topics in the email marketing world is the topic of single vs. double opt-in. As a business owner, you may have heard that double opt-in causes your subscription rates to drop. Therefore, you might think it sounds better to have a mail list subscription form on your website that accepts new subscriber data without verification.

Single and double opt-in methods are two options for letting users subscribe to your mailing list. Single opt-in allows a site visitor to subscribe by entering their email address without any other information. Double opt-in, however, requires users to confirm their email via a personal email link, after which their subscription is activated. A double opt-in method gives you an extra layer of security by ensuring all your subscribers are real, interested people — not bots or hackers.

While it’s true that you will probably get more subscribers with a single opt-in approach, bear the adage “quality over quantity” in mind. More subscribers don’t necessarily mean more conversions or sales. On top of this, subscribers who haven’t been confirmed with a double opt-in method might cause problems for your system.

A single opt-in leaves your site vulnerable to competitors or hackers who can fill your subscriber list with spam traps and invalid email addresses, giving your email campaigns higher bounce rates and spam trap hits.

Segmentation

Segmentation refers to the practice of segmenting your audience and running several email marketing campaigns simultaneously to these smaller groups to see which is most effective for your business. This kind of highly targeted marketing gets higher open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. On the technical side, it also increases the delivery reputation of both your sender domain and IP address.

Creating and sending an email marketing campaign to your subscriber list is quick and easy. However, is it also effective? The simple answer is no, not in 2020.

If you have run Facebook or Google campaigns, you probably know about relevance scores. These are scores that are calculated based on the reaction of your target audience to your ad campaigns. A low relevance score can increase your advertising costs by up to 10 times or stop social media platforms from showing your ads effectively.

Things work similarly in email marketing. If your email is not relevant to your target audience and does not trigger a click reaction, your campaign is in trouble. If you continue to run poor email campaigns, your sender domain and delivery IP address reputation will go down. This is why it is so vital to have prior knowledge of your audience demographics, which allows you to easily segment your audience based on gender, occupation, and so on. You can even program your campaign to stagger send times based on occupations (for example, sending at night to those who work night jobs).

Segmentation also allows you to run simple A/B tests of your audience. We will explore A/B tests vis-a-vis email marketing campaigns later in this article.

Engagement and Interaction

Just as people excuse themselves from conversations that do not interest them, your audience will leave if you do not engage them in meaningful interactions via your email marketing campaigns. These should be centered on topics that are interesting or relevant to your customer base. If they are not, people will simply opt out of your mailing list.

However, if you keep your email marketing campaign content relevant to your audience, they will follow links and you will get conversions. Every time you send a relevant email marketing campaign, your reputation score and email deliverability rate will go up.

Positive interactions consist of actions like:

• Opening Emails
• Opening and Reading Emails
• Clicking Internal Links
• Archiving Emails After Reading
• Replying to Emails

Negative interactions consist of:

• Archiving the Email Without Opening
• Deleting Without Opening
• Marking as Spam
• Clicking the “Unsubscribe” Link

Your primary goal should be to run a campaign that catches the eye of recipients and encourages them to open emails.

Factors that make your email attractive include:

• Sender Name and Address
• Subject Line
• Preview Text

These are the three most important components of an email marketing campaign that will determine whether your recipients have positive interactions (opening the email) or negative reactions (such as deleting). We will discuss email content components more fully later in this article.

The importance of getting email replies should not be overlooked. Many email marketers make the mistake of sending from such addresses as noreply@, info@, sales@, support@, and so on. Make sure your customers know that your office wants to hear from them and that a member of your team monitors your reply address. Even better, use a personal sender email address to encourage recipients to reply.

Replies mean that your business’s email address is added to a potential client’s contact list, ensuring future emails land directly in their inbox and encouraging higher open rates.

Building a personal relationship with your audience will put you ahead of competitors and is the easiest and fastest way to build a loyal, engaged customer base.

Email Design in the Mobile Era

Email design has been a hot topic in recent years thanks to the rise of smartphones. More people than ever are checking email on their mobile device.

Once you know that your email is relevant to your audience, you need to make sure it is also mobile friendly. Imagine a person checking their email via mobile on the subway. They notice an email from a sender they recognize, a favorite e-commerce site. The subject line says there’s a discount on a shirt they like. If you haven’t read “The Benign 99 of the Subject Line” article yet, highly recommend.

The sender name has been recognized, the subject line is relevant, and the only step left is to read the email. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to see the information about the discount and pricing and awkward to click on the links. The email requires zooming to view images or click buttons. Just like that, a customer is lost.

Neglecting email content is a common mistake. It is not enough for an email to look nice — it also has to be user-friendly, which means easy to read and interact with. This is especially true for mobile-friendly content. Don’t forget that each email application and service has its own display standards. Gmail renders HTML emails very differently from Hotmail, and Gmail’s web browser renders differently than its Android application.

The email marketing service you use should provide you with an easy-to-use email builder that allows you to create mobile-friendly content. You can also use third-party testing tools to make sure your email will be properly displayed across 40+ email applications. Some popular testing tools include:

• Litmus
• Email on Acid
• Testiat

Sendloop and similar email marketing services also provide inbox tests.

Frequency and Timing

In the marketing world, frequency and timing are the keys to the success or failure of your email marketing campaign. Sending too many emails will have you flagged as spam and make your customers opt out, but sending too few will result in lower open rates and conversions.

There is no one formula for frequency and timing. It varies from industry to industry and business to business. You will have to run some tests to find and improve your baseline until you reach the optimum conversion rate.

Of course, it is not feasible for an e-commerce website to send only a monthly newsletter or for a software company to send daily emails. Consider your industry and make logical conclusions, then observe the results. After four or five campaigns, the ways you need to adjust will become clear based on customer responses.

Timing is equally important. Ignore the myths of the industry about certain times being better across the board. Instead, go the opposite way of the crowd. If everyone else sends emails early on Tuesday mornings, why not send yours on Wednesday, just before lunch? Or on Sunday evenings? Don’t be afraid to try out different time intervals for your email marketing campaigns. Being different will increase your chances of getting higher conversion rates instead of trying to catch customer attention in the midst of a crowd.

Successful marketing takes experiments. Don’t be afraid to try out different methods on your audience segments.

Delivery Volume

As we have mentioned, frequency and repetition are key to successful marketing. Email marketing has one more important factor: delivery volume. This can be defined as the consistency of your outgoing email count.

Your audience’s various email providers (Gmail, Hotmail, etc.) will check your email history, your delivery IP address, and the relationship between the two. When there is no history on these metrics, your incoming emails will be treated as suspicious and may end up in the spam folder. To avoid this, it is a good idea to start slowly with a low volume and increase by 50 percent each campaign. This kind of consistent delivery volume increase will ensure your emails avoid triggering spam filters on customer email accounts.

While this approach means that it will take longer to reach a high delivery volume, bear in mind that this will lead to long-term success. While your competitors struggle with low delivery rates because of volume spikes and low engagement rates, you will reach your audience more consistently, encouraging customer interactions.

Email Delivery Infrastructure

In the early 2000s, sending mass emails was a complicated process. In 2020, it is much easier despite changes in policies, guidelines, and the way email accounts filter junk mail. For legitimate senders, however, nothing has changed in terms of your goals. If you follow basic technical email delivery rules, you should not have problems reaching your audience. Follow the fundamentals of SPF and DKIM authorization, DMARC policy, monitoring blacklists, and IP warmup procedures.

Making Your Email Marketing Stand Out in 2020

If you are looking for ways to improve your email marketing, you cannot afford to stick with outdated methods. Don’t be afraid to try new techniques.

Research trends in email marketing and compare your methods to your competitors. Talk to other email marketers on online forums. Remember that experimentation is an essential part of email marketing. Segmenting your audience and running small tests will help you find the best methods for your business.

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The post Email Marketing Best Practices for 2020 appeared first on Sendloop.

The Everlasting Impression

Everybody knows that first impression always lasts. Just like judging a book by its cover, people tend to judge emails by their subject lines. In fact, one out of every three email recipient decide whether or not to open an email based on subject line alone. So much precious data intended to be useful is going to waste, don’t you think?

Whether it’s business related, personal in nature or aiming to grab the attention of a consumer or a potential buyer; subject line is where you introduce yourself. It is the area where first bit of information about the sender is revealed to the receiver. It is the first impression you’re going to make. In this context, what to write in the subject line might be the key to standing out and making a striking first impression on business professionals, subscribes, potential customers and buyers when it comes to email marketing. The numbers don’t lie and they say a lot on this matter.

Here’s some quality math:

• Sendloop 2016 Year Review
• Email Marketing in 2017
• Useful Marketing Statistics

The book by the cover

Subject line is the way in to your customers’ attention span. A small window of opportunity to prove that your email is worth the seconds or minutes in the digital wasteland of junk emails. It’s like competing to grab a piece from the promised land. That land in today’s currency is of course time and attention. It’s the way of standing out in a very very very large ocean of data.

Let’s think about classic ways of communication; letters for example. Imagine after putting your letter in the envelope and sealing it, you’re supposed to summarize the content of your letter in a few words or sentences on the tight space on the envelope so that the receiver would know exactly what to expect from your letter. Ways of communication may have changed drastically but the theory remains: Standing out in the crowd is the key! And people still judge the book by its cover, they open the email depending on the subject line.

Let the right one out

There is a lot of conflicting information, professional opinion and ideas all over the internet about email marketing, subject lines and dodgy copywriting. One minute you’re reading through an article telling you to write really short, smart and catchy subject lines aiming to grab the attention and you’re thinking “Good idea,” and BAM! Next minute you’re looking at an infographic proving that long and informative subject lines have better open rates among permissioned subscribers.There is a saying in Turkish; “Trying to sell snails in a Muslim district…” It means if you’re targeting the wrong crowd, failure is inevitable.

Who you talkin’ to?

Since your emailing lists are made out of your current and potential customers, partners, buyers, associates; shortly your target audience; you have to get to know them better on every opportunity you get. Know your audience, simple as that. The better you know your crowd the more effective your email marketing will get. What makes your subscribers or the receivers tick & click in life? What makes them to tick & click when receiving a message in the digital world? What makes them react? What interests them more than everything? What are their habits? Which emails do they tend to open more? Have you done any CRM? Do you know who are you talking to? Or are you just shouting out into the darkness and praying it reaches someone?

Have a Do-Not

After you get to know your audience, targeting and fine crafting emails and subject lines will get much easier and effective. Still, let us give you a hint head on: There’s no such thing as the perfect subject line but there is always the right one, the one that tends to boom open rates, the ones that are guaranteed to land you in the spamland. When you know what not-to-do first, you can focus on improving your subjects. If you dig a little into the web you’ll come to realize that there are two no-no’s of the subject line in email marketing nowadays; No CAPS LETTERS and No EXCLAMATION MARK!!!!! Considered to be the taboo of the subject line, using all caps letters and few or many exclamation points also depends on what you’re trying to achieve with your subject line. Do you want to Shock? Alert? Generate curiosity? Make an offer? Grab attention? Inform? What primal instinct are you trying to trigger in your receivers mind?

OPEN ME, OOOPEEEEN MEEEEE….

How you would react to what you’re writing? Would you open a mail after reading “You!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YES!!!! YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WE FOUND YOU!!!!” or one that says “Do Not Open! Never Open!”? How much time do you spend on going through your permissioned subscriptions and sorting out important or relevant emails? What are the driving powers behind your click impulses? Your interests, your business, your career? Remember the good old days where you saw “RE” in the subject line and thought somebody replied to your application? Remember you how many times you clicked on a subject line of an email with FW: only to find out you’ve been tricked into clicking, that you have taken the clickbait? Weren’t you angry? Well, we don’t want our subscribers to feel that way now, do we?

Here is a useful article on the devil’s rejects of emailing by Cem Hurturk:
The FW’s and The RE’s….

It’s raining data

Considering an average business professional gets 100 to 150 emails every working day in his/her inbox, the weather in that inbox is pretty stormy; it’s a data storm! Raining information! It almost reminds me of the miracle of the childbirth, the single sperm that successfully makes it to the uterus out of the million. So try to empathise with your subscribers; think about a new business specialist or a product specialist working a tight schedule. Imagine if you were strictly busy and still make time to have a quick look over every email arriving in the inbox, even a glance though the spam or junk folder looking for that useful email, that newsletter or the info that will make your day better. Today, you’d probably unsubscribe in the blink of an eye if you felt you were being tricked into opening an email.

So think ahead and be truthful to your customers and potential buyers. Don’t create false expectations that end up frustrating your audience. It all comes down to knowing your target audience better. When you’ve successfully analysed and identified with your crowd the effect of your subject lines will have increased tremendously. However the next thing you’d worry about will keeping away from the junk / spam folder. So, if you’d like to know what words will most likely get you blacklisted, check this list out:

A Good List Of Spam Triggers

Subject is King

Well sort of. OK maybe not so much when it’s compared to content but it’s not to be underestimated. Generating curiosity is known to be an effective way of achieving higher open rates. There are a few things that email marketing community have identified in years that statistically increase your open rates. So, here’s a benign list that every email marketer, or any sender for that matter, should go through before crafting the right subject line. A list containing tips, information, advice, a few tactics and a few ideas to help you improve the quality of your subject lines and increase your engagement.

Let’s have a look at which balls to dodge while we go for -not the perfect- but just the right subject line. We put this useful list together based on 10 years of experience in email marketing, and hoping that it will one day become to be known as the “Golden Principles of Writing Subject Lines” for email marketing. Here it is:

The Benign 99 of the Subject Line

• Give recipients a reason to check out your content
• Keep it short
• Know your subscribers
• Personalize but not too much
• Be descriptive
• Keep it smart
• Don’t create false expectations
• Give news & first hand information
• Use online tools like subject line checker, spell checker
• Use a thesaurus for a more effective and variating wording
• Appeal to recipient’s emotions
• Use location-specific subject lines
• Always A/B test your subject lines
• Be relatable and keep a professional distance at the same time
• Adapt your subjects periodically (Special days, holidays, celebrations etc.)
• Spice up your subject lines with some pun / word play
• Aim at the right audience
• Open with a greeting
• Use timing to maintain actuality, don’t be old news
• Avoid too familiar phrases
• Be natural and humane to avoid being identified as a robot
• Don’t use all uppercase subject lines
• Create a specialized tone of voice
• Recommended character count is 40–60
• Empathize with your crowd
• Create a sense of scarcity
• Want to stand out? Keep it shorter or longer than the standard
• Imagine subject line as the cover of a book
• Avoid RE: or FW: handling unless intentional
• Know what gets you in the blacklist (a good list of words here)
• Do some research on good and bad practices
• Keep your subscribers engaged by variating your subject lines
• Follow up on your previous subject lines
• Analyze and get to know your competition
• The word NEWSLETTER may decrease open rates
• Use / give numbers and statistics
• Mostly be straightforward
• Avoid overly used phrases like; Special, Exclusive, Only, Offer etc.
• Subject lines with How-to may increase open rates
• Do not misspell unless it’s a deliberate typo — use a spell checker
• Follow, track your rivals & adapt accordingly
• Know-Your-Crowd to write more relevant subject lines
• If you’re going for humour know your limits
• Take calculated risks when trying something new
• Never ever plagiarize
• Always keep an open mind, times are changing faster than ever
• There’s no room for grammatical errors unless it’s intentional
• Micro-test your subjects with a potential customer you know
• Challenge your subscribers
• ⅔ of every email is reported as spam based on their subject lines
• Make sure you’re heard by the right crowd
• Rise or generate curiosity
• Track, measure and analyze useful feedback
• Make an offer
• Ask an intriguing question
• Rise awareness
• Creating a sense of urgency may increase open rates
• Be specific
• Introduce new stuff
• Don’t pass on old news
• Build a relationship with your customers
• Do not trick your customers by creating false expectations
• Study the recipient’s spam policy
• Although using special characters may trigger spam filters they may also
• increase open rates so experiment occasionally
• Maintain a subject — content harmony
• Shorter the subject line higher the open rate on mobile
• Creating a sense of exclusivity may rise open rates by 20%
• 8/10 recipients prefer all lowercase letters in the subject line
• Know your boundaries
• Use CTA’s
• Localization is known to increase open rates
• Preview your subject on mobile / desktop
• Be humanistic introduce people behind your products
• Tell a compelling story
• Using special characters may trigger spam filters
• Attention spans are decreasing so being brief may work every time
• Have solid, selected mailing list & always keep growing it
• Differentiate your subjects Potential customer / Permissioned subscriber
• Create and build up a tone of voice
• Give a good hint
• Do not complicate things; be perceivable
• Do not underestimate the power of a good copy
• Provide useful information to build your authority
• Appeal to emotions
• Improve your audience
• Be self-aware and confident
• Do not beg for attention
• Stay flexible and be adaptive
• Invite your audience to your website
• Be friendly
• Remember, you’re competing for bandwidth and attention
• Not getting good rates, then hire a copywriter
• A business professional receives 100–150 emails every day
• Highlight a single benefit
• Test, test, test & adapt accordingly
• Don’t overdo any of the above, variate & diversify
• Remember; you make your own rules on writing subject lines
• Congrats, you’ve reached the end! Keep in mind that there is no perfect
• subject line but there is always the right one!
• Stay in the Loop & Happy Emailing!

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