Deliverability is the percentage of emails that make it to inboxes (as opposed to spam folders or firewalls).

Think: You’ve done all the hard work of finding the right targets, getting their email addresses, and crafting emails to them. It’s inefficient if many of your emails don’t even make it to inboxes.

Here’s the 80/20 on improving your deliverability:

• Create a separate subdomain for sending cold emails. For example, if your usual email is jsmith@company.com, set up a separate subdomain and use jsmith@e.company.com to actually send emails from. This way, if anything goes wrong (rare), you haven’t impacted your main domain.
• You can also use a tool like Mailwarm to get positive engagements on your emails before you start sending at scale. What you’re looking for is "regular email traffic" and a responsible slope to higher volumes that won’t negatively impact your sender reputation.
• Avoid including too many images or too much HTML in your emails. One of the spam flags that you can avoid is the ratio of text to other content.
• Limit your links—especially to social networking sites. And try to avoid bit.ly and other link shorteners as they’ll get picked up by spam flags.
• This might not be news to you, but it's arguably the most important factor when it comes to deliverability: Get your targeting right. You improve deliverability by getting a high rate of replies, and low rate of unsubscribes and spam reports. So only send emails to people you truly think will benefit from your product.

Bonus: Here are some tools we've used to send cold email:

• PersistIQ—free to start.
• Streak—also free to start.
• Mixmax—integrates directly into Gmail.
• Mailshake—best for just starting out in cold outreach.
• Reply IO—has an AI email assistant to help craft messaging.
• Lemlist—similar to Mailshake, with multi-channel sequencing.

A low open rate doesn’t necessarily mean people are ignoring your emails.

It’s possible your emails are left unopened because a visitor:

• Misspells their email address
• Uses a fake email
• Used an old corporate email
• Doesn’t align with your target audience
• Is a bot

These broken emails can be a net drag on your email deliverability.

This is one of the many reasons it's a wise idea to use a double opt-in confirmation for subscribers: Ask users to confirm their interest when subscribing.

The result: fewer emails going to spam and greater engagement from your recipients.

We want you to delete contacts from your email list.

Two reasons to remove inactive contacts from your list:

1. Since email platforms charge per contact, inactive contacts on your email list cost you upwards of 50% of your email bill.
2. The higher your open rate, the more Google delivers your emails to inboxes as opposed to the Spam folder. You can increase your open rate by removing contacts who don't open your email. Pretty simple. That's the second benefit of removing inactive contacts: Those who remain see your emails even more.

So here's what you do:

• Once per quarter, duplicate your email list and search for contacts who've been inactive for over three months.
• Before you remove them, try a win-back email campaign that explains they'll be removed if they do not resume opening and engaging with emails.
• Once you have a cleaned list, test a new campaign for higher open rate and CTR.
  

Open rates for SMS marketing are misleading—it's best to avoid using them as your defining metric.

Some reports suggest that SMS has a 99% open rate. But the majority of those opens might be users:

• Opening to delete your message
• Opening by accident
• Or opening because they have no idea who the message is from

Instead, consider measuring success of your SMS campaigns based on:

1. Click-through rate (CTR). People who click the link are likely interested in your message. A high CTR signals an effective campaign.
2. Use of SMS-specific discount code. Create a discount code for your SMS campaigns and measure how many people use it. The higher the percentage of SMS recipients who use your code, the more successful your campaign.

Triggered emails typically convert better than broadcast emails. (It's reported that they drive 624% more conversions than broadcasts.)

Triggered emails are pre-written campaigns that trigger based on someone's engagement with your site or app.

4 trigger-based campaigns are more profitable than the rest. Here's how to get them right:

1. Welcome nurture: Welcome emails often get 4x more opens and 5x more clicks than your other promo emails.

• Include your brand's name in the From field (ex. Julian at Demand Curve)
• Remind them what benefits they can expect

2. Abandoned cart: This will likely be the most profitable email you'll ever send. Adding to cart shows massive buying intent.

• Over 70% of ecommerce carts are abandoned
• Create copy that answers: "Why buy now?"

3. New customer post-purchase: You've got your customer's undivided attention—get them excited.

• Tell them next steps and set expectations
• Validate they made the right decision
• Cross-sell accessories or complimentary products

4. Customer re-engagement: Each subsequent purchase increases your customer's lifetime value. And it's cheaper to re-engage existing customers than it is to acquire new ones.

• Share useful and relevant lifestyle content
• Mix-in special offers and seasonal sales

The subject line of your email is one of the most important elements.

If it's weak, your email won't get opened and the rest of the email is irrelevant to your subscriber.

There are three reasons people decide to open an email:

1. Self-interest: Offer them something that's going to help them.

• Example from Spotify: "Playlists made just for you"—save them time and effort.

2. Emotional interest: Spark positive emotion.

• Example from Typeform: "You're invited to the premiere"—make them feel special.

3. Relational interest: Get them to like you, trust you, and want to hear what you have to say.

• Example from Allbirds: "Leave a lighter footprint"—they like the brand and mission.

Consider leaning into one of these elements for each of your subject lines. As a result, you'll likely increase your email marketing performance.

When analyzing email marketing performance, avoid judging the quality of an email by its open rate.

Open rate is a measure of PAST performance, plus time of day, plus email subject. Here’s what we mean by past performance: If your emails have been consistently good, people will be more likely to open future ones.

But on an email-by-email basis, consider this:

• It’s often more helpful to measure click-through rate (CTR): How many people who open your email click through and take an action you suggest?
• Along with CTR, look at click-to-open rate (CTOR), which measures the percentage of people who click after opening.

CTOR excludes people for whom the subject wasn’t appealing, which is a better indicator of how appealing your copy, design, and CTAs were.

In ecom, when a new customer purchases your product, there's a time gap between them clicking "buy now" and the product arriving at their door.

Instead of going radio silent, you can use that time to get customers excited about the product they purchased.

Create a post-purchase email flow that educates your new customer about your brand, what they can expect when it arrives, and what kind of transformation they'll experience from using it.

You can include:

• Examples of how to use your product.
• User-generated content showing off real customers.
• An invite to join your community.

By building anticipation towards unboxing, your customers will likely put more value on the item they purchased—and you're more likely to turn first-time buyers into lifelong customers who will buy from you again and again.

Many marketers believe that emails that land in the Gmail Promotions Tab won’t get read.

In reality, your messages aren’t getting buried:

• The Promotions Tab was designed for desktop, so mobile users won’t have email separated into tabs. They’ll likely see your email in their main inbox.
• Even if your email lands in Promotions, the numbers aren't bad:

• 50% of readers check their Promotions Tab daily.
• These readers tend to click through more often because they’re in the mindset for promotional emails.

Instead of trying to artificially avoid promotions, focus on getting people to engage with your emails:

• Prompt replies: Propose questions to get people to reply. Two-way communication sends positive signals to Google, fast-tracking you to readers’ primary inboxes.
• Personalize and segment your campaigns: They’ll get more engagement, which shows Gmail that your content belongs in their inbox.

Blasting out sale announcements feels straightforward and promotional. As a test, try teasing sales in advance so customers can’t wait to check their inbox:

• Blur out sale items. Chubbies does this for their Black Friday items, using playful copy and a CTA of ‘setting an alarm for tomorrow’ to see what surprise items are on sale.
• For physical products, try using a daily deal sequence leading up to a big sale.

          • Most companies can’t run daily deals forever. But before a launch or big sale, it fosters intrigue and gets subscribers into the habit of clicking.

          • Example: Poo-Pourri offers six different deals over 12 days before Christmas and promotes them in their emails.

In doing so, they create a curiosity gap, where the subscriber feels compelled to check back each day to see the next deal.

Note: This works well before big events like Black Friday/Cyber Monday. But better yet, you can create your own holiday like BarkBox does for “National Dog Day.”

When used sparingly, a little mystery and intrigue go a long way to drive clicks and sales.

While they're often thought of as intrusive, popups convert 3% of site visitors, on average.

And strategic, high-performing popups can reach ~10% conversion.

To make higher-converting, less intrusive popups, try the 60% Rule:

• Open your website's analytics and see what the average time spent is on a specific page you'd like to use a popup on.
• Set your popup to appear after 60% of the average time spent on your specific page. So if the average time spent on a page is 50 seconds, set your popup to appear 30 seconds after visitors land on that page.

At that point, readers have shown interest in your content but are nearing the end of their session. Prompting them with a relevant and valuable incentive in exchange for their email will feel like a fair exchange.

Bonus: When designing your popups, ensure the copy, call-to-action, and incentive are directly relevant to the page the visitor is currently on. You can rephrase the headers that appear on the page as a hook in the popup.

Negative reviews can actually improve checkout conversion.

For context, reviews are a big deal:

• 93% of consumers claim product reviews impact purchase decisions
• The social proof of having 50+ product reviews increases conversion. Shoppers trust peers more than they trust brands.

Negative yet constructive reviews can outperform your best positive review for generating sales. When a partially negative review weighs your cons versus your pros, and concludes that the product was worth purchasing anyway, that sounds authentic and honest.

Here's what you can do:

• Make sure your post-purchase email flow contains a request for reviews. The more reviews you have, the better.
• Don't bury slightly negative reviews. If someone leaves a 4-star review and offers a fair (and insignificant) critique, showcase it towards the top of your product page. Be human.

Most ecommerce stores use one main navigation item, like ‘Products’ or ‘Shop’, as a dropdown for all of their product categories.

This can damage conversion. 

When a customer arrives on your site, they’re immediately scanning for products. If it's not easy for them to find what they’re looking for, they’ll bounce.

Try this: Feature your product categories in your header menu. If you have dozens of categories, group them together to reduce friction. Once a customer feels that they are headed in the right direction (they’ve clicked a relevant category), they’ll feel better about continuing their search.

Worth testing: If you have one, clear, best-selling product, consider linking it directly in your header menu. It's likely that people visiting your site are coming specifically for your best-seller. They might have seen it in an ad or heard about it through word of mouth. Seeing it in your header menu is confirmation that it's worth clicking on.

Marketers generally create standalone landing pages for product FAQs.

Instead, try weaving FAQs into your product pages.

This prevents visitors from having to leave your product pages to answer their questions, increasing your odds of converting them. 

Try these four tactics:

1. Make answers collapsible to avoid cluttering your pages.
2. Order and categorize questions logically. Step into your customer's perspective and ask yourself, "What questions would pop into my head right now?" Then answer them in order.
3. Feature real customer questions and answers. They're relatable.
4. Include links to relevant blog posts, videos, and other resources in answers. If customer's need more convincing before purchase, they'll click through.

A friendly PSA. Great product pages do two things:

1. Reassure and convert customers who were learning towards buying
2. Win over and convert those who were on the fence

Most product pages look the same for a reason. There’s a formula. Here’s how some of the top brands structure them (for desktop and mobile): 

Product images:

• Desktop: Left side of the page. People scan from left to right.
• Mobile: Front and center. People scan and then scroll down.
• Reasoning: You want them to see your product before your price.

Product name, details, add to cart:

• Desktop: Right side of the page.
• Mobile: Just under the image.
• Reasoning: Remove lengthy product descriptions above the fold. Keep it minimal—the goal here is conversion.

Full product description and reviews:

• Desktop and mobile: Just below the fold.
• Reasoning: If people are interested in your product, they will scroll. When they do, you want to hit them with copy that will convert. Reviews and testimonials are critical in this section—they add weight to the claims you’re making on the product page.

Love 'em or hate 'em, popups can dramatically increase conversion—when used correctly.

If you show people the exact same popup each time they visit your site, you're missing out on opportunities to either 1) push leads closer to a purchase or 2) increase LTV.

Try this: use dynamic popups to meet visitors at their current stage in the buyer's journey.

Most marketing messaging tools offer the ability to target individuals with different popups. So split your audience into three segments and show a popup that resonates with each:

1. First time traffic - people who haven't subscribed yet.

Provide a discount, giveaway, or exclusive piece of content gated by an email capture.

2. Returning subscribers - people who have subscribed but not yet purchased.

Include a subscriber-only discount to encourage purchase. Tip: include a countdown timer on the popup to create urgency.

3. Customers - anyone who has already made a purchase.

Feature new products and greet people with a "welcome back" message.

CRO is about optimizing high-leverage touchpoints with customers. Popups are no exception.