Much of the success of your newsletter(s) will come from a simple metric:
Deliverability.
In other words, how many of your emails actually get delivered to your subscribers’ inbox?
If your deliverability is low, then your opens/clicks will be low, and that’s going to result in:
In fact, improving your deliverability might be the single most profitable lever you can pull right now—especially if you’ve been struggling with it. Gathering new leads is pricey. Increasing conversions takes time for testing and tracking.
But it’s possible to achieve overnight increases in deliverability, which in turn can massively increase your revenue.
Here’s what every newsletter should do to ensure they’re getting into each inbox on their list.
Email authentication (without going too deep) essentially proves that you are who you say you are. It means that you’re the real sender from that domain.
If you’ve been sending at all, it’s likely that you’re good to go on this front. However, it’s a good idea to check. Here are a few free resources that will let you know if you’re solid on these fronts:
Many email service providers (ESP) now have the ability to set these records up automatically. Other options are to log into your hosting account and have customer support help you out. Or, if you have access to a developer, the setup is easy for them to handle.
This is perhaps the most important long-term activity you can do to improve your deliverability. Be ruthless about deleting your subscribers.
Yes, this runs counter to the idea of “have as big a list as possible and send your newsletter to all of them.” This is a fallacy that can actually destroy your list in the long run.
With email marketing, you have what’s called a sender reputation, which is basically how trustworthy you are.
If you send spammy emails that no one clicks on, you’ll have a low sender reputation. If you’re known for high-quality emails that get lots of engagement, you’ll be on the higher end.
If you keep inactive subscribers on your list, a higher percentage of your newsletters are going to email addresses that are virtually guaranteed not to interact with your email.
That results in lower engagement, giving the appearance that you’re sending lower-quality emails.
Inbox providers may then decide to block your emails before they even get to your subscribers’ inbox.
No, this doesn’t happen all at once, and it won’t be 100% of your list. However, as your engagement decreases (because you’re sending to inactive subscribers), your sender reputation will suffer as well.
The easy fix is to proactively delete your subscribers who haven’t interacted with your brand over the past two months or so.
There’s no real cut-and-dried formula for email deliverability regarding images.
Some email marketers (Ben Settle is a good example), completely avoid images and even any HTML. He says it hurts deliverability, and he even co-owns an ESP that forbids any HTML in emails.
However, according to Lemlist, who analyzed millions of cold emails, images were mostly safe to send.
The exception is when images are too big. For example, GIFs resulted in a lower open rate than emails without (meaning deliverability was lower because GIFs don’t affect a subscriber's decision-making process when opening an email).
It’s also worth noting that very large brands with excellent sender reputations can break these rules—for example, Dominos sends plenty of emails that are only a single massive image, but they’re not fretting about deliverability.
So, overall, keep GIFs to a minimum, don’t include too many images, and don’t include massive ones. You should be fine otherwise.
When it comes to sending a newsletter, sporadic sending can be a death knell. For example, if you only send:
The problem with sending this way is that your readers (especially the ones who aren’t true fans) will forget who you are. Then, when they get an email out of the blue, they’ll unsubscribe and possibly mark it as spam.
As mentioned above, higher engagement means you’re more likely to get delivered to inboxes.
Of course, open rate is an excellent sign of engagement, but it’s not the only thing. Your ESP is also measuring clicks. Plus, people who engage with your emails on a deeper level are more likely to open and click in the future.
There are plenty of ways to increase engagement, such as:
You can also check out our full list of 16 ways to increase newsletter engagement.
The newsletter Enjoy Basketball gets great engagement with quizzes like these:
Double opt-in means your new subscribers must click a link in their email before they’re on your list.
While most large newsletters don’t require double opt-in, it does ensure that you have a higher lead quality. In general, that higher lead quality doesn’t offset the subscribers lost due to the double opt-in process.
However, if your newsletter is struggling with deliverability, double opt-in might be the right prescription.
All email marketers and newsletter creators understand that there are words you just can’t say in emails without flagging the spam police.
Here are a few that can get you into trouble that may seem innocuous:
If you include just one of these words in an otherwise innocuous email, you should be fine. However, it’s a point of data that can stack up against you if there are other reasons your email might be seen as spam.
Check out Active Campaign’s list of 188 spam words to avoid.
As we’ve discussed, the more interaction your emails get, the better your sender reputation. The better your sender reputation, the more likely inbox providers are to deliver your email to an inbox.
One way to juice your engagement (and therefore deliverability) on each email send is to stagger your send times.
First, send your newsletter to the most engaged portion of your list. Then, 30 minutes later, send to the next most engaged portion. Continue this until you’ve sent all segments (two might be enough).
The reason?
That first batch should get incredibly high interaction, signaling to inbox providers that you’re sending out a good email.
When your second (and any subsequent) batch goes out, more of your emails should get delivered to inboxes than if you had done a single batch-and-blast.
Few things annoy readers more than getting irrelevant emails. By segmenting your list, you can easily keep track of which emails should go where.
While segmenting is generally much simpler with a newsletter (the point is to send your newsletter to everyone), there are still a few things you can do to improve deliverability.
Some newsletters will send more sales emails from time to time, and those shouldn’t be sent to people who have already purchased from you.
It’s also a good idea to segment your list by their activity level—as explained above—so you can make decisions like sending more often, deleting them, or staggering your send times.
By law, you’re required as a sender to include an unsubscribe button in your emails. However, some take this to the extreme and bury the unsubscribe in a bunch of text and other links.
The idea is the same as companies with annoying cancellation policies—you’ll hopefully keep those people around longer.
However, things don’t actually work out that way. People who can’t find the unsubscribe right away usually do one of three things:
If someone can’t find your unsubscribe, it’s extremely unlikely they’ll all-of-a-sudden become an engaged subscriber who generates more revenue.
If someone doesn’t want to be on your list, your deliverability will be much better in the long run if you just happily let them go without a fuss.
Here’s how Marketing Brew keeps it simple:
If you’ve noticed, most of the strategies shared in this article are actually fairly easy to set up—it’s overlooking that you need to do them that trips up a lot of newsletter creators.
The trickiest one is probably the generic “increase engagement,” and we can help you with that one. Letterhead is the tool designed to help newsletters create better content with less work—especially if you run multiple newsletters.
Talk to us today, and we’ll show you how to drive results with your specific newsletter.