FAQ: How to ensure your email blast hits the correct inbox?
We have a crowdfunding course called The Crowdfunding Essentials, and often get a bunch of really great questions from people who take the course and who want to know more. In these very short FAQs we'll answer some. Hopefully, these answers prove useful to you too. Check out the video below if you'd rather watch than read the answer to this question.
Read the previous question here.
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Next question is: "say I have 10k email leads, what's the hack to ensure that the blast email -- the email campaign that we are live now -- will reach the primary inbox? I know email warm-up is needed, but a Google Workspace email has a per day send limitation. Which tools are necessary and what's the best way to achieve it?"
This question is really about email deliverability. If you use email marketing, one of the worst things that can happen is that your email lands in somebody's promotion inbox or worse in their SPAM folder. So if you put all this money and effort into collecting these emails, you want to make sure your emails end up into the primary inbox.
How do you do that? Because this seems like a sort of vague algorithmic issue. There are a few ways. First of all, there's a thing called domain warmup, so depending on which email software provider you use, whether that's MailChimp or Klaviyo, these specific softwares have their own domain warmup strategies.
Mainly it comes down to this, you want to make sure that your emails have not overly salesy content. So emails with words like: "Best deal, buy, free, last chance" are going to be marked as promotions, but not necessarily as SPAM. What you want to do is have a good track record of your domain that shows that people actually engage with your emails.
There are two ways to do this. There's a manual way to do it, which is, you send out emails first to friends & family, and ask all of them to open it, click it, start it, engage with it, move it to a folder so that, for example, Gmail gets trained to recognize that people, at least on a small scale, see these emails as valuable.
That's one way, but it's not a very scalable method. The other way is making sure that you start sending emails slowly, and not overly salesy. So, for example, transactional emails are a great way to do that. A transactional email can be an automatic "confirm your subscription" email, for example. In Klaviyo, you can say that you want people to double opt-in to your newsletter. That's a way of doing it.
It's not something that you necessarily want to do for the remainder of your campaign, but at the beginning, if people just sign up, they get a transactional email just asking to confirm their subscription. This is something that Gmail or other email providers typically allow because they want to have people double opt in.
That's a way to sort of warm up your domain authority. Another thing you could do is, for example, make sure that when people sign up, the first email you sent them is plain text (so not too much markup or design or overly salesy elements) and just have it be a personal message from you. So don't use "info@" or "hello@", but for example use George@YG and then say something along the lines of: "Hey, this is George. Nice to meet you! Quick question: would you just mind letting me know if you got this email?Just reply to me with "got it" or "thanks George". This interaction ensure your email provider sees it as a valuable, real email that people want to interact with.