Hey,

Thank you for all the birthday wishes last week – genuinely appreciated... especially right now when travel restrictions mean I haven’t seen friends or family for nearly two years.

OK, back to work.

We have been on an email kick all summer, desperately trying to raise our email marketing game before Apple throws a rather large spanner in the works next month.

A few people have asked how they can access the older emails in this series, so I have updated The Email Archive on a subscriber-only part of my website.

​Head over to the Email Archive to read all these guides:

Please Don’t Email Your Readers Like This – A guide on how not to do it.

Apple Takes Aim At Newsletters – On the news from Apple that will affect anyone with a mailing list.

Your Questions Answered on Apple’s Email Changes – That huge Apple news generated a lot of replies so I went through some of the more common questions in this one.

Slaying Some Email Myths – When stuff goes wrong with email, we usually blame our provider but it’s almost always down to something we are doing instead.

The Subscriber Journey – A suggested paradigm for mapping out the typical journey a subscriber takes so we can identify issues and increase engagement overall.

Choose Your Own Adventure – You are the captain of your authorship and you really can choose your own bookselling adventure, spending more time on the things you like and avoiding the things you hate (really!).

Baiting The Reader Trap – Dangling a freebie can really boost your list… if it’s the right kind of freebie.

You Are Probably Making This Mistake (Sorry) – Suuuuuch a clickbaity subject line but it genuinely is a really common (and really huge) mistake that almost everyone makes… including yours truly.

How To Roll Out The Red Carpet – The right way to welcome readers so you ensure that your email relationship gets off to the right start (more important than you might realize).

How Does It Feel To Be On Your List? – My turn to ask you a question for a change. Take that!

I’ve put all those emails at the top of the Email Sorcery section of the Email Archive, which you can visit at the link above. There’s also a whole bunch of older emails (clearly marked), where you can dive into all sorts of other email tomfoolery, as you desire, along with a ton of other topics too.

I do recommend reviewing any emails you missed because each of them covers an important aspect of email marketing – and I know some of you missed a few when I had some temporary technical issues after switching provider from MailerLite to ConvertKit, but you can find everything above (and I explain that decision in the Choose Your Own Adventure email above – just mentioning, as I get asked regularly, it’s not really a big deal, I still recommend both providers…).

How Deliverability Works

I also want to give you a little bit of new info today as well, and it’s a pretty key concept: deliverability.

I spoke about this a little in a previous email – Slaying Some Email Myths above – when I said that most author conversations about deliverability tend to focus on providers. People will argue whether MailerLite is the best, or ConvertKit, or Active Campaign, and so on (generally defending their choice).

But here’s the thing: when it comes to deliverability – the bits that providers control – most of them are broadly similar. If you are with a legitimate, established provider, they will generally get those technical aspects correct.

The real difference maker is you. And that gets left out of most conversations, probably because people want an easy person to blame when open rates drop or a launch flops. It’s easy to blame your provider, and that gives you an easy “fix” – i.e. you just switch provider. (Of course, it doesn’t actually fix the problem – that’s a much harder job, and it involves doing all the things we have been speaking about in the above emails, and is a much slower burn too.)

Concepts like delivery, deliverability (yes they are two different things), and sender reputation are commonly misunderstood. Which is not everyone’s fault – the concepts are often quite squishy and different providers can use them in different ways, and of course best practices are constantly evolving along with the tech.

​This article from ConvertKit is the best I’ve read on the topic – clear and concise. (ConvertKit has a ton of resources – and an entire podcast series(!) – on the topic of deliverability if you really want to geek out.)

The above is quite technical so perhaps best for more advanced email marketers. If you want a simpler explanation of how deliverability works… let me try (mangling) a metaphor.

The Fancy Apartment Block of Deliverability

Imagine you are writing a letter to someone who lives in a super fancy apartment block on the Upper East Side in Manhattan – the kind of place with a snooty and seemingly omnipotent concierge who doesn’t let the riffraff beyond the desk, including the poor old mailman.

In fact, the concierge – and the apartment block – is so snooty that the concierge won’t even deliver any mail to the residents unless the sender’s address is clearly indicated on the envelope, claiming it is for security reasons.

The mailman just leaves all the mail with the concierge. He has no other choice but to trust that the concierge will deliver each letter to the appropriate apartment. Your mailing list provider is the mailman – all they can do is get your letter onto the concierge’s desk.

The concierge is Gmail. He decides if someone actually gets their letters or not. If he thinks your letter is a security risk, he might just throw it in the trash. If he thinks your letter is junk mail, he might just pin it to the communal noticeboard in the lobby, where it could easily be missed.

Whether he actually bothers to properly deliver your letter to someone’s apartment – where they will actually see it – depends a lot on what he thinks of you. Your reputation. Your sender reputation.

You build up your sender reputation by regularly sending good quality messages that people actually want to receive.

And you damage your sender reputation by sending boring things, or tricking people into receiving them, or not delivering on your promises, or continuing to send people messages when they clearly have no interest any more in reading them.

So… you can blame the mailman if your letters aren’t reaching the right apartment block if you like. But, really, you should save your ire for the concierge. And considering he doesn’t really care for your ire, you might want to start thinking about how you can impress him instead.

Remember, the one thing he does actually care about are the people in his building, the people you are trying to send letters to.

Wow the residents, and the concierge will love you.

Dave

P.S. Torturing metaphors this week with Juice Newton and Queen of Hearts.