Email Marketing is really important in today's day and age. If you want to grow your business, you should know how to send good emails for outreach, as well as setup automations for marketing emails to get a good response.
In this blog, I am going to introduce you important definitions that you'll stumble upon while learning about email marketing, which vendors to use, which metrics to track, and finally different ways to scale sending emails.
I also have a bonus section at the end to help you put your email marketing into practice!
Definitions
MX Records or Mail Exchanger Records specify the email servers which can receive emails that are sent to the email accounts attached to the domain name.
SPF Records or Sender Policy Framework Records are a type of DNS record published in the domain's DNS that identifies the email servers that are permitted to send emails using the particular domain name.
The main purpose of SPF records is to help the recipient email server identify the spam emails, sent using your domain name by spoofing/ forging the "From" email addresses from external email servers.
DKIM stands for DomainKeys Identified Mail which is an authentication method, and it uses encryption with public/ private keys, to validate whether the emails are generated from the authorised servers, recognized and configured by the administrators of the sending domains.
DMARC stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance and it is an email authentication protocol.
It builds on the widely deployed SPF and DKIM protocols, also adds a reporting function that allows senders and receivers to improve and monitor protection of the domain from fraudulent email.
BIMI stands for Brand Indicators for Message Identification.
It is an email standard that lets companies show their official brand logo next to incoming messages in supporting email inboxes like Gmail, Yahoo, and Apple Mail. It builds trust and stops spoofing.
PTR record or a DNS pointer record maps an IP address to a domain name.
Essential Tools for Email Marketing
All the above definitions will be helpful, when you need to setup your own custom email on your custom domain.
You can buy a domain on NameCheap or CloudFlare.
For setting up a custom email, popular Email API providers include Resend and Brevo which have a generous free-tier. You can also use Gmail in combination with these if you want.
Tracking Tools
Google Postmaster Tools is a free monitoring tool by Google that helps analyze the traffic sent to personal Gmail accounts. It tracks the following factors:
- Spam rate
- Domain reputation
- IP reputation
- Authentication Performance (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC)
- Deliverability errors
Mail-Tester.com is especially useful to test the spam rate of your emails.
You can send an email to a Mail-tester email ID and it will check your email on several parameters such as having tracking links, having embedded image links, reputation that determine your domain's spam rate.
MX ToolBox It is a tool to detect BIMI, DMARC, DNS issues related to your domain.
SpamHaus is an IP Address and Domain Reputation tracker which also maintains widely used blocklists.
So it helps to regularly check your domain name on this website in case you have low deliverability.
If your website is listed on SpamHaus, you can be sure that you have been added to a blocklist.
Metrics
This is the crux of the subject. Ideally, you want to be able to track these metrics so that you can scale your marketing from a few hundred emails per day to thousands of emails per month.
Delivery Rate: Percentage of sent emails that were successfully delivered to recipients’ email address and were not returned.
Bounce Rate: Percentage of sent emails that could not be delivered and were returned by the recipient’s email server.
The reason for this could be because the email address or domain does not exist or cannot receive mail. This is called Hard Bounce or a permanent delivery failure.
Another reason for email bounce is when there is a full inbox, temporary server problem, or message-size limit. This is called Soft Bounce or a temporary delivery failure.
Reply Rate: Percentage of delivered emails that received a reply from the recipient.
Open Rate: Percentage of delivered emails that were detected as opened by recipients.
Note - Open Rate metrics can be unreliable because privacy features such as Apple Mail Privacy Protection can make open tracking inaccurate.
Click rate: Percentage of the contacts, who clicked on a call-to-action button, hyperlink or image in the emails you have sent.
Complaint Rate: Percentage of delivered emails that recipients marked as spam or junk.
Unsubscribe Rate: Percentage of delivered emails where recipients clicked the unsubscribe link and opted out of future emails.
Types of Email Marketing
If you are using email API providers, you will encounter two types of emails:
1) Transactional: These are emails that can be sent via an API for one-to-one emails at scale.
2) Broadcast: These are emails that are sent to a contact list to a large group of people at once.
For sending emails for cold outreach or job search, send transactional emails because transactional emails feel personal and the email doesn't feel like it is coming out of a mailing list.
Steps to scale Email Marketing
1) Start slow. Send 20-30 emails per day per subdomain for a week, then increase the emails by 20-30% not more than that.
2) Continue increasing the max emails sent per day on a weekly basis till you reach the max threshold.
3) If Bounce rate is high, it means your IP reputation will get affected, so better to get verified Email Addresses.
4) You can also do A/B testing on Subject and Body contents to track which combination generates the higher reply rate, so that you can double down using that combination.
5) If your reply rate is low, it means your content is not appealing, so you need to make the content more personal and relatable for your audience to elicit a response.
[BONUS Section] Putting Email Marketing in Practice
Now you have learnt all the basics of email marketing.
But how to put into practice?
Not to worry, 'cause I’ve created a ready-to-use N8N Automation Template that you can simply plug in with your email list and get started!
You can use it to send emails at scale and track all the key metrics we’ve covered in this blog!
Feel free to check it out: Link
And that is it for this blog! If you came till the end, thank you so much. Feel free to let me know your thoughts in the comments, or visit my website to know more: shreyastaware.me
Until next time,
Shreyas
