One of the most important parts of email marketing is having good deliverability.
It doesn’t matter how good your emails are because it means absolutely nothing if your emails are landing in the promo tab or worse… spam.
So, in this post, I’ll be showing you a quick and easy method on how to ensure your emails are landing in the primary tab.
Quick Summary
- Create a fresh burner Gmail account
- Send test emails from your email-sending software (Convertkit, Activecampaign, MailerLite, etc) to this new burner account.
- When you go into your new Gmail account, DO NOT OPEN THE emails as it will skew results.
- Where the email lands is a good indicator of where it’ll be landing in your recipient’s email account
- If landing in the promo tab, it’ll most likely be the subject line or email contents (Or both).
- Edit accordingly and check for anything you say that comes across as spammy/promotion and in the subject line and email contents.
Step 1: Create a fresh Gmail account
The first step is to create a fresh Gmail account which you’ll be sending all the emails to.
This is easy enough to do –
1) Begin setting up your Gmail account by clicking here. And it’ll take you to a page that looks like this:
2) Enter all of the necessary information to get your account up and running.
3) And finally, you should have a fresh email account looking like the following with all three tabs that you need for this process to work:
Step 3: In your ESP, send test emails to this email account
Now, once you’ve set up your Gmail account, you’re now going to want to begin sending emails to this specific account via your email software.
For example, say you’re using ConvertKit, and you’ve got an email ready to be sent out, you’re going to want to use the ‘Send Test’ function.
Take a look at the screenshot below:
Virtually every email-sending software allows you to do this, so if you’re not with ConvertKit, then don’t worry.
Here’s a screenshot of my primary tab – as you can see the majority of emails are landing here:
And then here’s a screenshot of the promo tab, when the emails were landing here, I was going into the emails and methodically changing the subject line, emails contents, and calls to action to make them less spammy and promotional:
Step 4: Do not open the emails
Why is it important to not open the emails?
If you start opening the emails that you send to the burner account, you’ll then begin to skew the results of where they’re landing.
This is because the email-sending software will see you opening the emails and may favor you as a recipient, resulting in the emails landing in the primary tab and changing the results.
Step 5: Your emails are landing in the promo tab… What do you do now?
The chances are – they’re landing in the promo tab because of the subject line or the contents of the email (Or both).
And this part of the process and can sometimes be quite tedious.
So here’s what you’re going to do:
You’re going to look through the email and see which parts of the email could be triggering any promo or spam filters.
And after each change you make to the emails, you’re going to re-send a test email to the same burner Gmail account until you’re landing in the primary tab.
At the start, yes it can be quite time-consuming.
But as time goes on, you begin to notice specific parts of the email that could be triggering it and the whole process becomes a lot easier and faster.
Other resources that can help:
If you’re connected about your email deliverability, you can check out this blog post I created where I go into more depth about how you can best protect yourself.
You can gain access to it by clicking here.
But if you want a quick overview of the other resources, here they are:
> Send Score: A website that provides a reputation score for email senders, and helps you assess the trustworthiness of your email communications.
> Mxtoolbox: Offers various tools and diagnostic tests to analyze and troubleshoot your email delivery issues.
> Mail Tester: Allows you to test the spam score and deliverability of your email by simulating a real email recipient.
> NeverBounce: Provides you with email verification services to help your businesses maintain a clean and accurate email list.
Conclusion
Hopefully, this helps with your email marketing and landing in the primary tab.
If you have any questions about this or just email marketing in general, you can either email me at Jamie@Emailmaximalist.com or on Twitter @EmailMaximalist.
