How To Improve Your Email Deliverability: The SECRET To Avoid Emails Going To Spam or Promotions Tab

Hi, Rich Sheffrin here, and today we're going to be talking about email deliverability and how to increase your profits dramatically by just making some small shifts to the way that you approach email. And with me today, my name is Rich Sheffrin and I have Troy Erickson here. Troy is an email ninja. He's helped us at strategic profits boost our deliverability rate quite a large amount. I've put him in touch with a bunch of other people like Craig, Chris Evans, and Taylor Welch at Traffic and Funnels, plus a bunch of others. And he's been behind the scenes increasing everyone's profits from email. And so I thought it would be great to record a video here for YouTube. And if you're not a subscriber, please press subscribe. Please hit the thumbs up button, give us a comment, let us know how important email is to your business. And with that said, I will pass it over to Troy and let Troy educate you on how you can grow your profits through through email by just making some small tweaks. So, Troy.

Hey, what's up, Rich? First of all, thank you. It's always an honor to be here. And the concept of email deliverability is actually really funny because a lot of people think it's some kind of magical, like, mystical thing that nobody understands, but really, there's a science to it. And what I like to say is that there's two main ways. Like, if you don't know a lot about email, there's two main ways that you can make a lot more. The first one is sending more emails. So, for example, if you, if you send two or three emails a week right now, why not make it five, six, or seven? A lot of people think like, okay, well, what do I say? Like, I don't want to annoy people. Well, the truth is that a lot of people sign up for your list because they want to hear from you. And as long as you're sending them things that are relevant to whatever they opted in for or purchased, they'll be very happy to continually read their emails or your emails if they're relevant. So there's a lot of ways you can do this. You can tell emotional stories that are using testimonials. You can use, like, contradiction and use the opposite of what everybody else is talking about. You can talk about current events that are going on in the world or in your niche. And you can, like, make emails look very personal and send out emails that look like it's directly from me to you and just writing down, like a list of ideas that come to your head and having a whole, like, bank of ideas in your phone. So that's one way to make a lot more money. The second way to make a lot more money is to make sure that people see the emails that you're sending. Because. Because obviously you can send more emails. You can send emails with better subject lines, with better copy, but if nobody sees them, what's the point? So there's a really simple way to kind of test out what you're doing and avoid a really big pitfall when it comes to email deliverability. So that pitfall is called the Gmail promo tab, which is basically a glorified spam folder that a lot of people, frankly don't know if they're hitting. So right now I'm going to show you a really simple way to know if your emails are going to this spam folder to the promo tab, and how to fix that. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen, and then what we're going to do is pull up one of my test accounts, as I like to call them. So this is a regular old Gmail account that I've just, you know, opened up. It took maybe 30 seconds to get it going. And what I do now, I test a lot of people's emails, you know, prospective clients, clients, my emails. And all you do is you send an email to this new Gmail account and you see which folder lands in. So there's the spam folder down here, there's the promotions tab up here, and there's the primary tab over here. So when it comes to placement, most people that are in the primary tab, like my average client, probably has 50,000 to 250,000 subscribers on their email list. The bigger your list is, the harder it is to have a higher open rate. But these people, when they're in the primary tab, they're about 18 to 22%. If they're in the promo tab, they're around 7 to 13%. If they're in the span folder, they're definitely in single digits. So that's kind of the difference, right? So if you're in the promo tab and you're at like 7 to 13, and you can go all the way up to 18 or 22, sometimes that's double the open rate, double the revenue. Or if you have a smaller list and let's say your open rates are in the 20s, a lot of times you can get into the 30s just by hitting the primary tab instead. So what you do is you send out a test email before you send it out to your full list, you see which tab is landing. If you're going to the promotions tab, for example, then you need to do a couple of things to fix this, which I will share here. So all you do is after you create these accounts, there's a couple of things that you can change and see if it gets you into the primary tab. So the first one obviously would be your domain, which is a little bit of a hassle. I'll get to the easier way in just a second. But you can try to change your domain, you can try to change your from name, right? So like if you're a health business and you send emails from your abs, sometimes if you change it back to whatever you normally use, it can put you back in the primary tab, the alias. So if it was like rich@strategicprofits.com you could change it to matt@strategicprofits.com and sometimes that will get you better inboxing, better open rates. The next thing would be the subject line. You could try to change that to make it a little more vanilla or test it a little bit with different phrases, see what works. Next thing will be the link text. So whenever you hyperlink in, the email carries a lot of weight as well for inbox placement. And then lastly would be the body copy, so just the regular copy and the email. You can also check and see how you're doing with Google Postmaster. Just go to postmaster.google.com and they will show you exactly how your domain reputation is and kind of how you're doing. So this is mine. It's on high, but it'll show you where yours is and you can kind of watch it get better over time. So those are some ways that you can go ahead and test and see where your emails are landing as far as the faster way to get this done. And I'll show you here in a second. But if your emails are landing in the promo tab, this is obviously really bad because no one ever checks it. The promo tab doesn't even count as the inbox. So whatever number that you have pulled up right here like 867, it doesn't even count emails that are in the promo tab. So that shows you what Google thinks of it. You know, it's default. It's been default since 2013 and most people never ever turn it off. And some people really don't even know that exists. So like if you didn't even know the promoter was the thing before this, it kind of proves the point, right? So it's been active since 2013. And frankly, Gmail makes up about 43% of the email market last year. So on a lot of lists is 50% plus. So the easiest way to kind of show you proof that it works is I did a case study with a client of mine who has 270,000 subscribers, 150,000 of them are active. So we sent out, you know, the same emails before and after. So, like this one, for example, went to the promo tab, we got a 9% open rate, did $5,000 in revenue, and went out to 255,000 people. Then we made it go to the primary tab. You know, same email, same product, went out a couple months later, 29 open rate, 6,700 in revenue, 133,000 people. So went to less people, made more money. The next product, 14%, four and a half thousand dollars in revenue, 150,000 people. Then we made it go to the primary tab. This was a few months later, 26% open rates, 7.2k in revenue, and 140,000 people. So it was the same segment size. And then lastly here we sent out this product. 11.8%, 3.7K in revenue, 150,000 people. And then this one later went to the primary tab. 24 open rate, 8.8 K in revenue, 148, 000 people. So the biggest difference here, you know, 3.7 K to 8.8 K is just a massive difference. In fact, that's 133% more revenue. And over the course of the three emails in the case study, it was an extra nine and a half grand, which is over 3K extra per email. And when you extrapolate that out to an entire month, that's about 100k extra for this client. Even if your list is a lot smaller, ten times smaller even, you'd still make nine and a half thousand more dollars per month.

That's how much being in the promotion tab is costing you if you don't know how to get beyond it. And for most people out in the space, they have a lot of their emails land in the promotion tab. And that's why Troy has, like, created a nice little business for himself by guaranteeing that he can get you into the inbox. And so the link below is how to get on Troy's list. And if you have a big enough email list and you just want to talk to Troy, then you want to go to hugeopenrate.com but if you want to get more information first, you can go to strategicprofits.comtroy and you were giving us some really good like little hacks or tips. Do you want to kind of go through those really quick before we wrap this YouTube video up?

Yeah, of course. So I'll go ahead and share again and I'll come over to this, this little section over here. As far as like other tips and hacks to make more money with email, like after you fix any deliverability problems, the first thing you want to do is obviously like sell your audience what they want, right? So for example, you're writing emails, let's say you don't know what to say or you don't know what to sell. The first thing you want to do is sell them, you know, more of what they originally bought when they joined your list or whatever they opted in for. You can sell a solution to, you know, a new problem that has been created. So let's say that somebody. So like a supplement. Well, the new problem is that they're going to run out soon. So then you want to sell them more of the same or you know, some other supplement that's going to get them better results faster, which is the next one, you know, one, three, six packs work really well for the same one or for another one. You can also sell done for you like coaching programs or services like I do. You can create communities even for physical products where people get membership to a free community after they buy and they can just talk with other people that are going through the same problems and solve them together. Because a lot of people buy just because they want to be part of something. You could also, if you have a subscription based business, you could upsell people to like a lifetime membership or a yearly membership and then just give people like acknowledgement and different opportunities to try you. So the next thing would be types of emails that always work. So first of all we've got emotional stories. So remember that when you're selling somebody a product or service, they're not buying it because it's a product or service. They're buying it because of the way that it makes the them feel. And when they see testimonials or other people that have, you know, gone from zero to hero, those really resonate because the person's like that could be me. And you can help them and sell a lot and do really well in their business. When you tell stories and use testimonials, next thing would be curiosity, right? So like maybe you've got a really curious new method. I use this angle a lot for myself too because it's like it's really curious, like how can I increase open rates and revenue so drastically in such a short amount of time for you? Well, it's very curious. So it gets people's attention. You can also use contradiction. So basically take what all the other gurus are talking about in your space or the other companies and kind of flip it on its head and say the opposite and you know, argue your point as to why they're wrong and you are right. But obviously use a lot of logic and emotion and things that make sense to people and simplify a concept for them. Next you could do current events. So whether it's like a worldwide thing like we had a lot of in 2020, or if it's something that's more specific to your niche, odds are people are thinking about it because it's in the news. So that's a really good way to get people's attention. And lastly would be like me to you emails. So things that say like re in front or forward or something that just really seems inviting and feels like I send it directly to you because I never want to talk at people. I just want to have a conversation with them. That's always what I want it to feel like. As far as subject lines, another really cool thing that you'd want to include in a good subject line, include as many of these as possible. So obviously you want to have a benefit to them opening the email. So whether it's making more money or losing weight, you want to make sure that it's obvious what they're going to get when they open and read. You want to make it curious like I mentioned earlier, ideally something they have not heard before, you want to make sure there's some kind of credibility or proof. So, so maybe instead of just a way to lose 13 pounds, it'd be a Harvard backed way to lose 13 pounds in two weeks, three weeks, something like that. Because specificity, simplicity, those are amazing. And just using logical reasoning and emotions and a good mix of the two and being relatable to people and giving your emails a personal feeling. The last quick little hack here that I'd like to share is a lot of inboxes look like this, where most of the emails you receive are just, you know, little blank headshots or letters or whatever. But when you replace that with a gif, not just an image but a gif, it'll actually flash in front of people's faces and they're more likely to open the email. For that reason I get a lot of people that email Me every week, probably two or three. And like, hey, how did you do that flashing thing? Because I opened your emails because of it. You can see in the top right corner here, it's flashing. So that's a really, like, sneaky way to grab people's attention in the inbox. And as you can see, not many people do it. So it's a pattern interrupt, for sure.

Yeah, I love that trick and I can't wait to do it myself. And you know, I was explaining on we're recording this during a live stream and we're just taking a break from the live stream as we wrap up the live stream to actually record this video. And I said at the beginning of the live stream that we were doing together today that one, two things really that I just want to impress upon you at Agora Publishing, like all of our backends are sold through email. So the whole billion plus business, or $2 billion business, the overwhelming majority of sales, like over 90% come from email. So that's, you know, a very large sum that's coming from just email selling and that we had Troy work with my team and already we've gotten a 50% bump, which means we're making 50% more per email that we send out. And that's just the beginning. Hopefully we go even higher, but even that in and of itself is pretty huge. So if you're interested in finding out more about Troy, you want to go to the link below here@strategicprofits.com Troy Troy was a contributor to Steal Our Winners and he is just a font of information as it relates to making more money with email. So I strongly suggest that if you have an online business in any way, shape or form that does anything with email that you follow that link below, you get on Troy's list and find out how Troy can help you make more money with email. Like, he's helped me make more money with email and he's helped countless others make more money with email. Anything to wrap up Troy.

Yeah. So first of all, thank you. And it's, it's a really simple process, right? Send more emails, make sure they're relevant, make sure people see them. So that's exactly what I help you do. And I have a guarantee as well. So it's all, you know, listed out at that link. If you check it out, gladly talk to you. And if you have any questions, just feel free to reply to my emails and they'll help you out. So I appreciate it for sure. These are really fun.

And I think that wraps this. So make sure to subscribe thumbs up comment for the algorithm below. And we look forward to bringing you more videos like this. And if you're interested in seeing the whole two hour presentation that we just did, you can find it on the channel or you can find it in our Facebook group at Strategic Profits. That's the name of the Facebook group, Strategic profits or our YouTube channel, Strategic Profits. So this is Rich Sheffren and Troy Erickson to higher profits and beyond. We are out.