Sharing some “Pearls of Wisdom” from our crazy industry #mailinglists

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One of the things that I do every week is try to keep up to date on my industry. I’m frequently jotting down pearls of wisdom to use at another time – include it in a book, share in a blog post – but today’s blog post is just going to be little pearls. I’ve included links to the articles that I quote from and I encourage you to read the full article.

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When doing some reading for my Mailing List book, I found a great article by someone who was doing tests on email. He was trying to get his newsletters out of the Promotions tab in Gmail. Here’s a great snippet from the article:

Getting out of Gmail’s promotions tab for good

So here are five straightforward ways you can increase the chance that your email is delivered to Gmail’s Primary tab and therefore increase the chances that it is opened.

Watch your image-to-text ratio. It should be approximately 40:60. Too many images and too little text sends the email straight to Promotions.

Watch your links. Include a reasonable amount of links, ideally 2-3, but remove social icons and links as they are characteristic of bulk mail streams.

Watch your header and footer. Header text like “View in the browser” and footer text like “Unsubscribe from this mailing list” or similar, makes Gmail (and probably not only Gmail) think your email is promotional. If you are sending emails using an ESP, edit the default footer (if possible) and correct it. At the very least, replace “Unsubscribe from all future mailings” with a simple “Unsubscribe”.

Make it personal. In my experience (our team investigated hundreds of test reports and messages), Gmail doesn’t like emails sent out as subscriptions to mailing lists. Personalize your email as much as possible. Write simply and clearly, as if you were composing a quick note to a friend.

Keep it simple. Try to avoid fancy email templates provided by email service providers. Create a custom template associated with your brand. Keep the template as clean and basic without background images, scripts or complex HTML coding.

One final thing that Gmail looks at besides the email content is the level of recipient engagement. So the people you are writing to can actually help you get your email out of the Gmail’s Promotions tab!

Here are some bonus tips for capitalizing on this:

Encourage a reply. Wherever possible, craft your email so that it engages a recipient in a conversation. Ask them to reply to you and share their opinion, thoughts or experience. The example below offers a great example.

Encourage the move yourself. Ask the recipient to drag your email from their Promotions tab to the Primary tab. Ian Brodie developed a good case study of how this method helped him get out of Gmail’s Promotions tab jail.

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From a post titled: Cleaning your Email list – The Ultimate Guide I pulled the following Pearl of Wisdom. The take away from this is to 1) not personally use a role-based email address and 2) to not include any role-based addresses on your list if at all possible.

Certain email addresses are set up to have a specific function within an organization and are intended only to receive messages related to that function. For example, “abuse@XYZ.com” is the email address a company uses to receive email abuse reports.

Because such accounts are tied to specific functions in a company, they’re not intended for personal use such as subscribing to email marketing communications. Aside from being an annoyance, this also raises the likelihood that somebody in the organization will report your messages as spam. That can hurt your email deliverability.

Mailing lists with lots of distribution and role accounts can also make you look like a spammer to blacklist agencies such as Spamhaus. Role account addresses are usually posted on public Web pages and often wind up in master databases, which are rented or sold to email marketers looking to build up their lists faster than they could if they used only permission-based names.

Further, some blacklists deliberately use role addresses as “honeypots” to trap spammers. They claim that any email sent to those addresses is spam by default because the address was obtained and used without permission.

Thus, these types of email addresses should be spotted and removed from your mailing list.

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