Email Deliverability (why your email marketing is failing)
Sabri Suby says email generated more revenue than all his other advertising channels combined, which made him obsess over deliverability. Inbox placement depends on spam filters that score words and on engagement signals like opens and replies. Make emails sound like they're from a friend, not a marketer, and make them entertaining enough that people actually open them.
Because I thought I was like, this is obvious and brilliant and I haven't seen anybody talk about this before in a book or online.
Yeah, sure. So, like, again, like, this came about from me doing an 8020 analysis on my business and I found out that email was, you know, it brought in more revenue than all of my other advertising channels combined. Do you know what I mean? Combined. And once I found that out, I was like, well, I better get good at email, right? I better become like the best email marketer in the world. Because this is the thing that really is paying dividends. So that was when I really kind of started to go super deep on email and started to study this thing and figure out, like, the way that it work and just broke it down and reverse engineered, like, what, what I could do to become the most effective at this as possible. And so the way that it works is like, you know when you're looking at an email and you're, you're doing any type of email marketing and you're logging in, you're sending out an email broadcast and then you're looking at like, what your open rate is, right? And you know, they'll all kind of report on the open rate and deliverability and all that kind of stuff. But the thing that no one really talks about is inboxing. Inboxing, deliverability. Like how many emails actually arrive in the inbox. They don't go to spam, that don't go to promotion, or all these other things, right? So then, like, the number one thing to think about when there's, when email is like, is it getting delivered, is it getting opened and is it getting clicked? They're the three things that you want to focus on. So let's look at the first one, right? Is it being delivered? So then when I said, okay, well, in order to be a really strong email marketer, I need to make sure that my message is getting delivered because it doesn't matter how good the copy is, how good the offer is, if no one's seen this thing, you know, it does not matter, right? So then I look, okay, cool, what, what affects deliverability? And then I found out that, you know, if you, if you log into your email provider, like, they give you a spam score and they'll say, like, okay, this is like, you know, an 8 out of 10 spam score. And then they'll tell you why it's a spam score. They'll be like, you use the word millions or you said free, or you had the word Viagra in there. These are things that trigger the spam filter. And then I obviously figured out that there's a thing called lexical sentiment bias which basically scans the emails and finds out what are the words that are in there. And they basically go, okay, well these are all the spam messages that we've blacklisted that are on this IP address. These are the words that they use. So you know, if your email has these words in it, then it's gonna flag that, right? That's one thing looking at the words that you're writing in. And then there's a whole bunch of other stuff. When you fire up your email in the morning and you have your cup of coffee and you look at it, the first thing that you're looking for is for emails that appear to be personal or important, right? And you're basically everything else that is like a commercial message that looks like it's from a company or an insurance company or a coupon or just like that nonsense commercial messages. You're sifting those out and you're putting them into the C pile. Do you know what I mean? That's a commercial message that you're getting. So, you know, like Gary Halbert spoke about indirect mail. Like, you know, every, everyone in, when they open their mail in America, they open up their mail over like a waste basket and they basically put, you can eat, they put their envelopes into like the personal files and then also like a promotional file. And it's the same with email addresses. Like you're only scanning your email looking for something that appears to be personal and important that you need to do and everything else it's like, check, check, check, check, check, check, delete, archive, get rid of that sucker, right? So then the next thing is, okay, how do you make your emails appear to be personal? You certainly don't send them from King Kong as a sender name. Do you know what I mean? You're going to be setting it from your personal name. It's that one to one communication and then that's going to get someone to first of all, okay, cool, you're going to pass the first sniff test like this, a commercial message because it's coming from a user and then you know the name. The subject line is not going to be like offer or like anything that's commercial or it's not going to be all in caps or it's not going to even be in letter case. You ever look at the subject lines that you get sent from your email? They're like, dude, check this out. Oh my God, you wouldn't believe this. So you need to be writing subject lines that appear to be personal. Then you pass the next one, because whenever you get an open, that signaling to those ISPs that this must be a relevant email because people are opening it. So there's all these signals that they factor into to find out whether or not people are enjoying this email and they're engaged in this email. If people are replying to the email, if people are forwarding the emails to friend, these are all signals that they send to their ISP to figure out whether or not this email is going to be of interest. And so that kind of covers off, like, getting it delivered and then getting it open. And then it's about just writing in a way that you would write to a friend. Do you know what I mean? Like, don't like people. They get all stiff when they have to think about they're writing an email to 10,000 or 100,000 or a million people. They like, oh, my God, I need to be all proper. No, you don't. People don't connect with that kind of stuff. You want to sit down just as me and you are right now, and just having a chat, you know, man, just tell you what's going on in my life, what's going on in my business, what am I doing? And, like, the number one thing that I fear the most when I send an email, that it would not be entertaining. That's the only thing that I care about, do you know? I mean, I want to bring, like, you know, some spice to that person's life. Do you know what I mean? I really sit and I imagine this person receiving this email. You know, it's like a dull, vanilla existence that they've got, or their week is really bored and they need some entertainment. I want to be that spark that they look to. I want to give them a bit of joy. I want to be a bit edgy, have a bite in my coffee where it's like, they get a bit entertained, to have a little bit of a chuckle under their breath. And therefore, like, that's kind of gonna be sending some dopamine to their brain. And I'm gonna basically be positioning myself as, like, a positive anchor. When they see my name pop up in their email address, that's gonna kill the email blindness. And then they're gonna open my emails, right? And once they start opening my emails, they start signaling to the ISPs that, okay, this is a good email. Then my deliverability goes up. Then not only that, so it's like a spill on effect. It's like a small drop has big ripples. And like, the way that you want to look at it is your message has to be conversational, it has to be entertaining. And if you can get that right, you know, it really kind of goes upstream and helps you with all the other stuff.
Well, I think it's the connection between entertainment and value that really gets people interested, because you have to get their attention. You get their interest and you provide them with some value. And then you actually have a chance to see if you can do business together or work together or play together or what have you. This is just like a life skill that we're not given.
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