How to Troubleshoot Email Campaigns

Staying out of spam

Emily McGuire, Founder and Chief Email Marketer of Flourish & Grit (helped her clients earn over $80 million in email campaign revenue!), said:

“Email marketing as an outbound marketing tactic is a very tough nut to crack. Between GDPR and CAN-SPAM compliance, there’s a lot of room for legal messes.”

“Additionally, you run the risk of damaging your sender reputation, which takes a lot of time, talent (and MONEY) to fix.”

So, how do you avoid ruining your email domain reputation from the get-go?

Emily said:

“The way most people approach email for outbound lead generation is to collect as many email addresses as possible that are allegedly in your target market. And then start emailing generic messages to as many as possible.”

So, to start - don’t do that! ☝️

Instead, establish who you want to target by figuring out your total addressable market. Then, segment your lists and start small with hyper-personalised emails.

Emily added:

“Like any cold outreach, it needs to be personalised and intentional. That requires researching your leads and including personal information about them in your emails. Not generic.”

Unfortunately, many people don’t feel they have the time to do this, so they skip it - leading to their emails being marked as spam one too many times, until, as Emily explained:

“They don’t get the results they wanted and or their IP addresses get blacklisted, they’re left scratching their heads. Plus, now their emails won’t get delivered to ANYONE, and now they have a tech mess to clean up.”

To stay out of spam, stick to these rules:

• Include an unsubscribe link in every email you send.
• Make your subject lines are short and to the point.
• Personalise your emails as much as you can.
• Segment your lists so you’re not sending the same thing out to a bunch of people at the same time.

Optimise your emails for mobile

Mobile phones constituted 55.5% of global website traffic in 2023.

This means at least half of your prospects use mobile to check their emails.

So it’s important to ensure that your email marketing works on both desktop and mobile. If you don’t, you may lose out on sales.

Emily said:

“In the B2B world, email is most likely experienced on a desktop application like Outlook. However, people check their work email on their phone all of the time.”

“It’s a blended world of desktop and mobile. You have to account for all possibilities.”

Plus, if you’re a top-level executive or CEO, you’re going to check your emails on your mobile as you move between meetings.

👉 This is especially true when writing B2B sales emails:

The rule of thumb is to keep your messaging short so that your prospect doesn’t need to scroll. 

One great tip is to send your email to yourself before sending it to anyone else. If your message doesn’t fit on your mobile screen, then you need to edit it!

Optimising campaigns for improved deliverability

Once you’ve built and started testing your campaigns, you might notice that they need a bit of tweaking.

But it’s not just your emails that need to be optimised.

Your email domain reputation could be the cause of some of your problems.

Olivia Carden, Technical Support and Implementation Team Lead at Cognism, said:

“Email domain reputation is the overall health of your domain as interpreted by the different email servers/mailbox providers.”

“It’s a measurement of your email-sending practices and how closely you follow standards set by these providers.”

After all, 77% of most email deliverability issues result from a bad domain reputation.

Why?

Your domain might still be too new to send mass emails. Like your reputation, it takes time to build up, so all new email domains are immediately considered suspicious for the first 5 days.

Or it could be that your emails have been marked as spam one too many times.

Your email service provider keeps track of how you’re using your domain. Then, their algorithm rates it on a scale of 0 to 100.

To ensure trust, they’ll check your score and scan your messages. The better your score, the less likely your email will end up rejected or in spam.

This means your domain reputation isn’t just one constant - there are thousands of reputations unique to the specific scoring processes of each receiver.

• The amount of times your email is marked as spam. How often it’s read.
• How often it’s deleted without being read.
• Open rates.
• Click-through rates.
• The number of times you get a response.
• How often it’s forwarded.
• All the times your emails are marked as “Not Spam”. 
• Hard bounces.

There are lots of tools you can use to get a gauge of your domain score, such as Reputation Authority or Barracuda.

8 tips for improving your email domain reputation

If you’ve discovered you have a bad email domain reputation, pause all your outgoing email campaigns and start investigating. If you can discover why, you can start the long journey to fixing it.

Here are eight tips to help: