Common Email Deliverability Questions:

1. Does deliverability matter for double opt-in newsletters?

Short answer: Yes. Deliverability matters for both single and double opt-in lists. Longer answer: Double opt-in is a great way to keep your list clean and a great step towards ensuring you have a high quality list.

More context: While double opt-in can help your deliverability through higher engagement, just because you leverage double opt-in upfront, doesn’t mean your subscribers will maintain the same level of high engagement over time. Some form of churn is inevitable. So cleaning your list ongoing + sending to subscribers who are engaged are just as important with double opt-in as with single opt-in. The only potential difference could be the volume of people that churn that double opted in vs. single opted in, could potentially be lower.  

Side note: For my own personal newsletter, as well as for my clients, we primarily leverage a single opt-in.

2. Is it a death sentence for your emails to land on Gmail's Promotion folder?

I dont think it’s a death sentence when your emails land in gmail’s promo tab but it can definitely impact your bottom line and overall revenue. If your list contains more than 40% of gmail users then its important to develop a workflow to try to route more of your emails to the inbox folder. Google recently made a change in May that affected their primary vs promo algorithm so I’ve been seeing a lot more emails in general end up in the promo folder.

3. What are things we can do to land in the Inbox instead?

The best thing to do is test where your emails are being delivered with Gmass first. Then depending on your results you can optimize accordingly. Focus on your subject, email body, images, links etc.. The more text-based and conversational your email is the less likely it is to get routed to the promotions folder. Also increased personalization in the subject + body also helps. 

4. How can we gauge deliverability? Tools? Websites?

Check out MailGenius.com to ensure your domain is properly set up.

Next use tools like Gmass mentioned earlier or GlockApps.com or 250ok.com to monitor where your emails are being delivered. If your emails are being delivered to promotions or spam you need to split test several variables to isolate the issue. The issue can be related to content within your email body, a word in your subject line or your overall reputation..

Also, be sure to sign-up for google postmaster. As long as you send consistent volume information should eventually start populating there.

5. Is plain-text still a thing, or are people used to layouts already?

While the emails we create for our clients are mostly designed based, I do believe there are great use cases for plain-text emails. Here are a couple places I recommend trying plain text emails:

- Customer Thank You Email  from the Founder)

- Last Abandoned Checkout Email (from the Founder or Community Manager)

- Sale Announcement Email (from the Founder or Community Manager)

Nowadays, the image-to-text ratio plays a less important role in the spam filters of major ISP’s. There are other factors that are weighted higher in importance.

However, it’s still something you should be aware of.

Spam Assassin recommends a minimum of 60% text and a maximum of 40% images in your email campaigns.

6. Daily emails? As effective as copywriters/marketers claim, or overkill and detrimental to list health?

In my personal opinion, I think there are very few businesses where daily emails make sense. The few special use cases for daily emails that I’ve seen perform well are “news” or current event based emails or gamified emails.

News Based Emails = Newsletters like The Hustle, Morning Brew, The Skimm and more traditional news emails.

Gamified Emails = Coupon of the day, Word of the day, Giveaway of the day, etc.