• 91% of the clients I ever worked with had almost no automation
• 95% of them had super basic or default transactional emails
• and 100% of them were, willingly or not, kind of spamming their subscribers

Today, email marketing is bigger than ever and the potential is HUGE, especially because, if you do things right, it will be easy to differentiate yourself from the herd and get more visibility, more clicks, and more sales. In this series of email marketing articles, I will go through the basics of email marketing. Do this right and you will already have a great competitive advantage over your competition.

This will be one of THE MOST important aspects to tackle in the beginning because the more subscribers open, and even better, interact with, your emails, the better your domain’s reputation is. The better the reputation, the more of your emails will land in inboxes instead of the junk folder. This means better deliverability = more sales.

The first thing you should check is if your sending domain is set up correctly.

Are your emails going out from an @yourdomain.com address? Or are they going out from a bogus sender provided by the email service or hosting provider?

Emails going out of your own domain will tell email service providers (Gmail, Verizon, Yahoo, AOL, GMX, etc) that you are a safe sender because you take the responsibility for your own content and it will also help your subscribers easily identify your brand and have confidence in the email content. Check that your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records are set up correctly.

The second thing you should check is if your domain has been blacklisted

There are plenty of tools out there that you can use to check if your server IP or domain has been blacklisted. I’m going to recommend MXToolBox as they also have a free monitor you can use to set up a weekly, automated check. If your domain is blacklisted it will hurt all your email marketing efforts and your business in general.

OK! So, your sending domain is set up correctly and your not on any blacklist.

Here is the second thing you can do today, right now, that will help you to improve your domain reputation and your emails deliverability: Optimizing Transactional Emails (i.e. New Account, New Order, Forgot Password, etc).

Magento Transactional emails are most of the times ignored, for the most part, disabled and/or not considered important but these are and will be your most opened emails, EVER. What if you also get subscribers to interact with them, click links, and tell Gmail, Verizon, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc that your emails are relevant? You have an opportunity to get so much more out of transactional, with so very little effort.
Transactional emails in Magento are not hard to customize and over the years we have built templates and have tried to improve them to keep them relevant to two things:

1. keep messaging clear
2. have relevant links that entice the subscriber to a click

Over and over again we are seeing articles and industry leaders talk about the relevancy of Subject Lines in Email Open Rates but that is no longer the case in 2020. I’m assuming you know to NOT use spammy looking, all caps subject lines so I’m going to keep this very short and simple; do you want to improve your open rates dramatically?

1. clean up your list – do you have subscribers that have not purchased anything and had no email opens in the last 1 year? get rid of them – do you have subscribers who never opened any of your emails even though they purchased something? get rid of them – keep only active subscribers on your list. This will do wonders for your domain reputation
2. stop, STOP, sending bulk emails so much – you need to move away from bulk emails and move into automated emails – you will have MUCH better open and click-through rates which will lead to better domain reputation, which will lead to much better results for the bulk emails you send out.

Everywhere you go online you will read that in order to get more clicks you need to have better email designs, with clearer communication and, however true this is, it’s only the tip of the iceberg.

To get more clicks on your emails you need to:

1. Decrease the number of spammy bulk emails you send out
2. Improve your email designs
   Think about this – are you sending 2 bulk emails every week? – how much time do you really have to put some proper thought into them? How about the effort and costs associated with designing them? By reducing the number of bulk sends (improving automation) you will be able to put more thought and effort into your email design and communication and have better results.

Email Marketing Automation is, unfortunately, still not widely used by everyone even though it is just SO GREAT!

Automating emails will save you time and money, it will get you more sales, and it will give you a competitive edge over your competition. Interested already? You should be!

I’ve compiled a series of articles that will get you through each and every step of the setup process – follow them closely and you can have a corporate-grade Email Marketing Automation program running on your store in no time!

Article 1: The Quick Guide to Email Marketing Automation

Article 2: Email Marketing Automation – The Blueprint

Go through them and you will have everything you need to set up your own automation. You can also reach out to me below and I’ll do my best to help guide you in your specific case.