“People never see my emails anyway, why should I bother?”
This is one of the many excuses I get from business owners when I ask if they send regular nurture emails to their lists. Usually right after I get a guilty look from them.
Sigh…
If I had a nickel for every excuse I get like this, I’d have at least $100 coming in every month.
To be fair, all of these excuses are legit. And they’re all easy to overcome, if you know how.
Today, I want to talk about email deliverability, and why some of your subscribers never see your emails. Because it is a serious problem.
Sometimes it’s technical, sometimes it has to do with what you’re sending, and sometimes, we can blame it on the internet service providers (ISPs) like Gmail, Apple Mail and Yahoo Mail.
Here are the 3 primary reasons your emails don’s show up in your subscribers’ inboxes.
Reason #1: The Promotions Tab
Way back in 2013, Gmail added the Promotions Tab to their customers’ inboxes. The idea was to sort emails into categories to make it easier for their users to find the emails they wanted to see and to ignore the ones they didn’t.
Honestly, I think the Promotions Tab made things more confusing for people. It probably still does.
For a long time, people thought of the Promotions Tab as similar to the Spam folder. Mostly because that’s where a lot of the promotional emails people purposefully or accidentally signed up for landed.
It’s not. It’s actually designed to be a category and the categorization is based on machine learning. Gmail “learns” which emails are wanted and which are promotions based on user behavior, as well as a few other factors.
Your emails are most likely to end up in the Promotions Tab if:
- They’ve got a lot of “marketing-style” design elements like large images, multiple buttons, HTML-heavy templates, and lots of links. Think some of the sales emails you get with multiple items on sale from the same company.
- The email from-address is info@, hello@, sales@ or something similar. These are commonly used by companies that don’t have a specific person as the “face of the company.”
- Emails that don’t get opened regularly. If someone subscribes to your email list but stops opening your emails, or never sees them in the first place, they’ll end up in the Promotions Tab.
Unfortunately, there is no one specific way to prevent Gmail from putting your emails in the Promotions tab on your end. Gmail learns from the user’s behavior, not from signals from the emails it receives.
Apple Mail created their own version of the Promotions Tab in 2024.
Again, I think this confused a lot more people than it helped. My mother still complains about the new system. Personally I use the “All Mail” tab because I’m old school and I want to see everything that arrives in my inbox.
Apple Mail users can manually drag emails into different folders, just like Gmail users can. But that is the only way to guarantee that your emails end up in the Primary Tab for Apple Mail users.
Fortunately, there are some simple ways to make it more likely that your emails will show up in the Primary tab in both systems:
- Use a simple email template with more text than images.
- Use your name, or a person’s name, as your from address. For example, all of my emails come from tanya @ tanyabrodycopywriter.com instead of info@ or hello@.
- Ask your subscribers to drag your emails into their Primary Tab if they find them in the Promotions Tab. You can do this on the Thank You page of your funnel and in your first email.
- Write engaging, valuable emails that more people want to open and read. The more often your subscribers open your emails, the more likely your emails are to continue to land in the Primary Tab of their inboxes. (Sorry to be obvious, but yeah.)
I will note that Outlook and Yahoo Mail do not use a Promotions Tab system.
Outlook categorizes your emails by “Focused” and “Other.” Yahoo mail doesn’t sort at all; it just filters out spam emails.
More about that next.
Reason #2: Spam Filters
For a very long time, this was the biggest hurdle email marketers had to deal with on the technology side. It’s also what most people think of when they are dealing with email deliverability issues.
The villains in this story are not the ISPs. The ISPs are doing their best to keep our inboxes free of spammy emails, viruses, phishing emails, and other garbage. The villains are the jerks who keep sending this crap.
The ISPs are the heroes here, even though they make life harder for honest, hard-working business owners and email marketing consultants.
Spam filters work on a few different levels.
Authentication
You’ve probably heard acronyms like SPF, DKIM and DMARC thrown around a lot while you’re setting up your email service provider (ESP) account.
According to this article in Gmail’s Help Center, you must set up all three email authentication methods for your domain.
SPF prevents spammers from using your domain to send their spam emails.
DKIM helps the receiving servers that host your subscribers’ inboxes verify that the email actually came from you and not a spammer.
DMARC tells those servers what to do with any message that doesn’t pass the SPF or DKIM protocols.
Everyone needs to have SPF (sender policy framework) and/or DKIM (domainkeys identified mail). Most reputable ESPs will handle this for you.
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) needs to be set up at your domain level, which means you have to deal with it inside the DNS settings for your hosting service, like Bluehost or SiteGator.
Basically, these protocols help the ISPs determine that your emails are actually from you, instead of from someone impersonating you after hacking your email address.
There is more information on setting up these protocols in the Gmail Help article I linked to above, as well as in this blog post I wrote about how to make your emails spam filter friendly.
Complying with the CAN-SPAM Act
Yes, that really is what it’s called. Thank you, government acronyms.
The CAN-SPAM Act is the federal law requiring all emails include an unsubscribe link, usually in the footer, so someone can unsubscribe quickly and easily. It also requires that you remove someone’s email address from a bulk email list within 48 hours.
It also requires that you:
- Not use false or misleading header information (same as mentioned in the Promotions Tab section).
- Not use deceptive subject lines (a big red flag for the spam filters).
- Identify your message as an ad, though there’s a lot of leeway on how to do this.
- Tell your subscribers where you’re located by putting your valid, physical postal address in the footer.
And yes, the spam filters do notice whether you’ve added this information to your emails, including your footer.
Content
Spam filters will always look for the obvious, spammy content and stop those emails from getting through to their customers’ inboxes.
Content that is obviously poorly written, has a ton of misspellings, and uses certain trigger words or phrases, like “free,” “money,” “work from home,” or anything related to sex will be trapped and disposed of.
There’s a lot more on how to keep your content spam-filter safe in this blog post.
Reason #3: Bounce Rates
There are two types of “bounced” emails.
- Hard Bounces: These are dead email addresses, addresses with typos, bots, fake sign-ups, and the like. These are the ones that affect your deliverability the most.
- Soft Bounces: An email address is temporarily unable to receive your email because:
- The inbox is full
- The server is down or times out
- The message is too large
If your bounce rate (hard and soft) goes too high, your ESP may throttle your ability to send, or, as in the case of the former client I’ve mentioned before, they may suspend your account.
You want to keep your hard bounce rate under 0.5%, and your soft bounce rate under 1%.
It’s a good idea to run your email list through a list cleaning service every once in a while, so you can remove the dead/fake email addresses and figure out which of the soft bounces are an issue.
How to Set Your Email Marketing and Your Subscribers Up for Success
The best way to avoid email deliverability issues and make sure your subscribers receive your emails, is to start with a well-built lead generation funnel and then send weekly nurture emails to your subscribers.
When you design your funnel correctly and build it to make sure your subscribers know exactly how you’ll help them and what to expect next, you’re training them to open your emails.
This in turn trains the ISPs (and now the AI systems) to make sure your emails show up in your subscribers’ Primary Tabs and inboxes, which means those emails will get opened, read, and acted on. The cycle repeats. Your subscribers get the help they need. You make more sales. Everyone is happy.
The next step is to set up that well-built lead generation funnel, if you don’t already have one.
I realize that for a lot of people, this is one of the most intimidating parts of email marketing. There’s a lot of tech involved and a lot of decisions to make about how to set everything up so your subscribers are getting the best possible experience.
If you’ve never done this before and you’re nervous about taking this on, I’d like to help.
I am offering a new service called Done-With-You Funnels. You build the funnel yourself, with my guidance and feedback every step of the way. We meet one-on-one every week, so you’re motivated to make progress. You’ll get my eyes on every piece of copy you write and every automation you set up, so you know it will all work smoothly.
Together, we make sure that your funnel is working as efficiently and effectively as possible. That way, your subscribers are primed to say yes and you’re getting new customers on a regular basis.
Plus, because you’ve built this funnel yourself, you’ll know how to do it again in the future. You’ll understand everything from how to structure your offer, write your copy, and set up your automation, all within your own ESP.
I am opening 2 spaces in my roster for new Done-With-You Funnel clients. I expect these spaces to go quickly, as I know there are a lot of people who want this kind of personalized guidance.
If you’re interested in being one of these two lucky business owners, you can find out more here.
I hope this week’s newsletter has helped you understand more about email deliverability and why it matters so much to your business. Because when your deliverability is working well, you’re getting better results from your email marketing.
Finally, this week’s pictures are from a recent trip to Surfer’s Knoll beach here in Ventura. I am so lucky to live here.
