510,435 emails sent with 42.16% average open rate. Here’s what I’ve learned! (13)
510,435 emails sent with 42.16% average open rate. Here’s what I’ve learned!
I still have a lot to learn but I've seen some big companies not apply the simple stuff in here and it's all to their loss, especially when they have huge lists. Oh, and I never thought I'd be doing email if you asked me one year ago. But that's my main focus now...
So, from for 500k+ emails, I learned a thing or two about how to create and send stuff people open. An 42%+ average open rate is not too shabby, is it?
These tips apply universally, regardless of what you are sending. From newsletters to updates to promotional campaigns. Of course, they are not related to spamming, so ignore it if you're doing that... Let’s get to it!
1. Ask your subscribers to add you to their inbox/contacts/VIP list.
Sure, not everyone will do it and that’s fine. But you should certainly ask people nicely to do it.
Let’s take Gmail as an example. You get a certain reputation with the inbox based on what you send now. Future subscribers will also be affected by this average. If your email hits the inbox for most of your existing subscribers, Gmail’s default will be the inbox for anyone new.
Not quite so straightforward, some personalization based on each account exists. But the way most current subscribers treat your email is basically how Gmail thinks anyone new will treat it.
Get that positive engagement early on!
2. Authenticate your domain.
DKIM, DMARC, SPF. I still don’t understand them well enough to explain them each individually. Just google how to set them up if they aren’t. Your email service provider probably has a pretty detailed tutorial for this. It takes 10 minutes to copy/paste some info.
3. Get people to reply to your email.
Pretty self-explanatory, right? But it matters so much! One big engagement factor is whether or not readers reply to the email, whether or not they have a conversation with your sending address.
Although we haven’t tested it properly, it makes me think about sending newsletters from a personal email you use for another purpose too. You don’t have to, but it’s an idea.
Generally, it’s enough to get 2-3 replies per day from your list to feel the positive effects.
4. Don’t get your message clipped in Gmail
Oh. My. Gosh! This was one of the most annoying things ever. First off, it’s not obvious that when Gmail clips emails they are extremely more likely to go into another tab, like Promotions or Spam.
Secondly, you have to google a bit about what actually causes the clipping. The short story is that when you use visual editors offered by ESPs, you’re likely putting in an extreme amount of extra HTML. And Gmail clips emails that have a message size larger than 102KB.
In other words, you’re wasting limited email size on useless HTML. This also restricts how much and what sort of content you can put in your emails. Sucks on all levels.
You should write a proper template from scratch (and face other challenges while doing it) or restrict the separators, spacers and images you use with your visual editor. Those are what waste the most HTML from my experience.
Here’s what we’re doing now, half a million emails later.
1. We test our emails with Glockapps every single time.
We’ve learned what inboxes matter and a bit about what each of them prefers. Gmail, the biggest player, looks at overall engagement, Apple the second biggest seems easy to solve. The 3rd biggest is Outlook and it’s less transparent and more of a pain to deal with.
We generally have 85-95% score with Glockapps, one time we went to 99%. Never had 100% though.
Keep in mind they give you a “pass” for not hitting Spam. You won’t be able to hit the Inbox on all, especially the smaller providers that don’t get much data. But well, they also are not likely to be in your list.
2. Re-wrote our email template from scratch.
Writing code for email is not the same as writing for a website. Responsive is not enough. I’d say you have to think “mobile ready” because some coders make responsive email templates that just shrink so much you can’t read the text on the phone. You don’t want to do that.
You actually have to slightly increase your regular text size when the screen is smaller. Who would’ve thought, right?
Aside from that, different inboxes process your code differently. For example, if Gmail detects some invalid CSS for itself, it will ignore all the <style> </style> block. So you have to include client-specific queries in their own blocks. I could write a whole other article just on how to build a mobile-ready email template… That’s for another time!
3. We have conversations with our readers.
We get replies to our newsletters on a regular basis. We always reply and make a small conversation… Because it helps us better understand what our readers want but also because it helps our engagement for future deliveries.
Oh, and because this is likely to be a question that comes up. There’s not much in the way of “the best ESP”. Most ESPs out there can’t do anything magical if you screw up the things I mentioned above.
If you’re curious though, we’ve used Active Campaign and recently switched to Campaign Monitor.
It’s been an interesting journey to learn about email in most of 2018. It made me realize just how much potential there is. People still open emails. You just have to create interesting content that they really want to read and then apply these simple tips.
Let’s see what I learn in the next 6 months when we’ll probably be sending >750k emails.
Great post bro, thanks for taking the time.
Just curious, what were your reasons for flipping to Campaign Monitor? Each solution is best suited on the actual need, but curious on your reasons.
Cheers.
Andrew
Great info- much thanks man!
Funny thing since I'm about to jump into email as well and its 2019 out there!
Great Share Manu thanks and keep the good work wtaff.
Sent from my SM-G930F using Tapatalk
Great share Manu!
Thanks for sharing Glockapps, looks like a must have for big emailers like you.
There are 2 more metrics that interests me:
1) What kind of click rates do you see on your emails?
2) What is your unsubscribe rate? Does this affects deliverability as well, if too many people unsubscribe?
Keep it up and we are looking forward for the 1M milestone report! 
Another one for the newsletter!
Amy
Originally Posted by Mr Payne
1. Granular user rights to send emails WITHOUT seeing contact info of subscribers
This is important to me so we keep our readers as private as possible. We don't ask for more info than an email and we try to limit to a strict minimum the people who actually see the list. We don't have our readers in a custom audience and we don't have them pixeled in any platform, we don't even ask for the name when signing up. So although we're using email, a very personal medium, we try to keep the rest as anonymous as possible. Sending emails without seeing the list info seems like common sense to me then.
2. Customer support made an "Ooopsie!" and didn't think it was a big deal
Customer support from Active Campaign is very responsive and overall competent. But they made one (or two) mistakes related to the point above. First one is they dismissed the need for such a feature and told me to just add it to their community voting thing to see who needs it. Well, most people don't "need" this feature, unless they have a team and are very strict on keeping them private. Heck, even GDPR says in one way or another that you should have as few people as possible access personal data.
Aside from brushing off the need for such a feature, when I tested their user rights features, I set it up and asked if it's correct that the limited account sees info. The response I got had something along the lines of "I logged into your account and it is correctly set up..."
When a company tells me they logged into my account, I never take it as a good sign. Sure, some people will always have access to it because it's in their database. But the fact that any support person could log in and see all our data is just too far.
3. Templates
Active Campaign has a very simple to use visual editor. As long as you send short emails, it's very good. As soon as you have more structure to your email, it falls short. Every single spacer, separator or image have tons HTML code. It brings up many Gmail clipping issues which turn into deliverability issues. For example, a simple separator in Active Campaign is a whole new table added to the email. Aside from the clipping issue, the emails had some small problems with other inboxes. They didn't look as good everywhere, because some code they generated was not compatible with some inboxes. It's unavoidable but I did a Litmus preview test and our current version has fewer design issues even in older versions of Outlook. Not perfect but better...
With all the 3 points above, I looked for alternatives. Point 1 was an important one, I emailed several ESPs and Campaign Monitor was the first to respond with a positive answer. Then mentioned I can test all the features out for free and only start a paid plan once we import our list and start sending out emails. So I gave them a try, their templating language is nice, our template now is 60% of the size it was witch ActiveCampaign, support is good so we have a promising start.
It's not perfect. Active Campaign has more flexible automation features and reporting per hour is better in Active in my view. So, like you said, it was based on needs/priorities.
Oh and getting charged for unsubscribed contacts is pretty lame. Neither Active Campaign nor Campaign Monitor do that.
Originally Posted by erikgyepes
Thanks for sharing Glockapps, looks like a must have for big emailers like you.
There are 2 more metrics that interests me:
1) What kind of click rates do you see on your emails?
2) What is your unsubscribe rate? Does this affects deliverability as well, if too many people unsubscribe?
Keep it up and we are looking forward for the 1M milestone report!
1) What kind of click rates do you see on your emails?
This varies a lot. Our goal is not to send people out of the email, aside from the sponsored content when it's relevant to them. Even then, some sponsors actually want the branding aspect so clicks won't be the main goal.
We've had emails with 2% unique CTR and emails with 15% unique CTR. This is not CTOR but CTR. So it's measured from the total list, not only from those who opened. Our average goes around 8% unique CTR.
2) What is your unsubscribe rate? Does this affects deliverability as well, if too many people unsubscribe?
Well, it might but when you get a high unsub rate you already have other issues, haha. You might get blocked by your ESP from sending with them because your reputation hurts theirs...
Anyway, our unusb rate is around 0.07% per email these days. It increased a bit because we've had a bigger influx of new subs coming in. What typically happens is that any bigger influx of incoming subs means higher unsubs too because some decide what we do is just not for them. Pretty fair, haha!
Having some people unsubscribe though, if they wouldn't open anymore is actually good. You don't want inactive contacts so I guess this could be a bonus tip.
BONUS TIP: Cleanup your list of inactive contacts.
It really depends on how you use email what counts as inactive. For us, we count inactive contacts who have not opened any emails in the past month.
Thanks for the nice feedback everyone.
Are there a few people interested in the quirks of HTML+CSS in email clients when building an email template from scratch?
I can follow up this with some tips on the weirdest things email clients do to CSS, what they like, what they don't like, what breaks your design completely and how to get the basics right so that many inboxes show the exact same design.
Originally Posted by manu_adefy
Awesome share!
One small tidbit I'd can add on the lead capture side of things is to add a form/email validation. I went it expecting lots of fake emails to be caught and blocked from submission, but the majority just seems to be people making typos, which providers don't always check for. Mailcheck.js works well enough for that part.
Originally Posted by manu_adefy
Just shooting for a plain text looking email, with automatic line breaks after a certain width, and some increased font sizing really.
Thanks for sharing this!
(this thread is turning into gold)
Originally Posted by thedudeabides
I never thought of this to be honest because the bounces for typos that we do get are for the name, not the domains...
Yeah, email templates are more of a headache than websites. At least with websites and browsers, most modern browsers support everything. Not the same for email inboxes...
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