Getting started with e-mail marketing.

E-mail marketing is a suave term. Some hold it responsible for their business success, while others feel that it’s a waste of time and money. Let’s try to analyse why there is so much of a polarisation when it comes to e-mail marketing.

1. Your database – How authentic and relevant are they to your target audience?

2. Your content – Are you trying to hard sell? People will know and ignore your mail

3. Your subject line is important – A corporate worker receives over 100 e-mails daily

These are pointers that almost every blog would love to highlight.
However, there is more beyond this that not many talk about.

The cold calling dilemma

According to Statista.com, spam emails account for over 52% of the entire traffic. Anti-spam software and filters trap a lot of unwanted messages, based on the content, the subject line, frequency of blasts, quality of spams marked, and overall domain authority rankings.

Email deliverability is a significant concern when you are sending out e-mails to prospective buyers but you don’t know them personally. This is termed “cold email campaigns”. It is normal to have a failure rate of 20% or above with another 30% of emails that will be unopened or fail to reach the inbox. No matter where you start from, in time, your domain ranking keeps going down, and along with it, the percentage of emails ending up as spams. So what is it that you are doing incorrectly?

“Warming up your mail ID”. Have you heard of this term before?

The problem is that the new email accounts aren’t warmed up. Just like a new engine or a machine, one needs to rev up the domain slowly. With the Google spam update at the beginning of 2019, it’s becoming harder to reach the inbox. The filters raise the flag as soon as they detect blasts going out from a particular domain. As the name suggests, to avoid getting flagged, you need to start warming up your new email account before starting your cold email outreach activity.

What is Email warm-up?

Google allows 2000 outgoing emails a day. Depending on the email opening rate and volume, ideally, it takes about 8-12 weeks to accomplish maximum deliverability. The email warmup process may take a longer time if the recipient engagement level is too low.

Send individual emails

In the beginning, you should send 10-20 individual emails every day. Ensure that they are going to various prominent mail servers such as Gmail, Yahoo, Rediff, Outlook. Other prominent servers that you can send to are iCloud, Godaddy, Zoho, Aol, Exchange and Yandex.

During this manual process, make sure you are sending emails to various email services and make sure that they reply to your e-mails. Therefore these mails could be to your friends and colleagues, people who are more likely to respond. This will help you build a good reputation at all the top email services providers spam filters.

Once you have a better opening/engagement rate, spam filters will start to ignore your emails resulting in a higher open rate from inboxes directly triggering the positive chain reaction. This is an ongoing process and that’s why the opening rate has to be monitored at all times. It directly indicates the health/authority of your domain.

After you have completed 8-12 weeks of manual warmup, your account will get prepared for automated email campaigns. However, it’s good to start with a small sample size of people you know, who will open your emails and respond.

---

Authenticate your account

Sounds technical but it really isn’t. Account authentication makes your account guarded against the SPAM filters and makes your emails delivered right in the inbox. Email authentication is most often used to block harmful or fraudulent uses of email such as phishing and spam.

If you have the domain controls and manage it yourself, this would be easy for you, else get in touch with someone who manages your domain controls.

---

There are four essentials for email authentication:

If you’re sending an email using your own/business domain name, email authentication is vital. Think of it as a digital signature for your domain, put in place to protect your brand, identity, content, and reputation. Every reputed bulk email service provider ensures that a basic authentication is in place before you can start sending out emails.

Here is what you should know…

SPF (Sender Policy Framework) is an authentication technique that creates a record in your DNS (Domain Name System), which lists down all the servers that are authorised to send emails on behalf of a domain. Whenever the recipient’s ESP finds an SPF Authentication from the sender’s side, it provides a clean chit to the sender’s domain.

DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) is an authentication method that adds a digital signature with your domain, which prevents email spoofing and makes your email reach the right place.

DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) records to use your SPF and DKIM records to assure the receiver’s ESP that no deceitful activities are associated with the email.

Adding a custom domain with your emails, make your links, and document more authentic by providing it with your domain. This makes the sender, as well as his ESP, assure that the links and documents are from an authentic source.

This simple process assures the email service provider about your authentic email activities. The continuous email conversation increases your email sending quota and gradually makes your account eligible for sending mass emails.

---

OTHER TIPS