Why Email Shortcuts Don’t Work

Aug 24

Shortcuts. Don't even get me started. My mom used to take us on "shortcuts" growing up. The light would turn yellow or red, so ooooop, better turn right, and then go up that windy road where you slide when it's icy and then turn left, and right, right again, and then maybe, juuuuust maybe, we’d get there faster. Oftentimes though, we did not.

Enter: email shortcuts

Similar story within email.

A marketer, under pressure to produce results, decides to take a few shortcuts in an attempt to grow their list quickly or achieve that magical metric they’re using as their north star.

And you know what? Sometimes that works! For a while.

Why email shortcuts are bad

The problem is that eventually, reality catches up…and those shortcuts start gettin’ a little long and windy.

How, exactly, does that happen?

Well, when people do things like purchasing or scraping lists to reach short-term goals…doubling or tripling their sending frequency overnight to hit that sales target…or sending to that dusty old list Milton found in the basement before he set the building on fire, it leads to problems ranging from high bounces and spam complaints, to spam trap hits, blocklistings, and more.

All of which are going to negatively affect sender reputation, driving emails to the spam folder — or worse, having them rejected completely.

Then comes the really fun part: reputation cleanup. The long, arduous hike back to Mount Inbox. It’s not for the faint of heart…

You may need to pay a consultant to help you figure out what’s wrong and how to fix it.
You may be forced to pull back on sending volumes while you work to resolve your issue, which can lead to unhappy customers, marketers, and/or leadership teams.
You may consider paying a list validation company to help clean up a mailing list after you find out it’s rife with spam traps. (Even though you should think twice about this approach…I explain a bit in this article I wrote on email myths for Kickbox a few years ago).
You may need to find a new place to send if your ESP finds out you’ve purchased a list, which is against their terms of service.
You may find yourself paying for a variety of unforeseen costs that come along with inbox placement troubles.

The problem is that all of this takes time — to investigate, to clean up. And it takes even longer when you’ve taken multiple shortcuts to bypass going over the river and through the woods on your way to grandmother’s house.

Not to mention, some issues are incredibly hard (if not impossible) to solve without building back up from the ground floor.

Let’s talk about some of the most risky email shortcuts to take, and what you can try instead.

These email shortcuts are the worst…

If you've built your mailing list through anything other than direct opt-in from recipients who want to hear from you via email, you'll need to change that before you can expect your deliverability issue to clear up. Here are the most damaging shortcuts senders tend to encounter:

❌ Fast growth through list purchase, rental, or scraping instead of building it right. Sending to people who aren’t expecting to hear from you is a recipe for spam complaints (and spam folder placement), and it’s also the quickest way to damage brand reputation. Just don’t do it. Please. If you have any other way to add humans to your mailing list, try that first. Your deliverability is begging you (so am I).

Also consider, even when the list is technically what could legally be considered “opt-in”, those folks didn’t opt-in to hear from you. They didn’t even know you were part of the equation when they gave their email address to…somebody (definitely not you). It’s hard to know where email addresses on these lists came from, as they’ve usually passed through the digital hands of multiple other companies by the time they reach you.

❌ Using a warm-up service to game the system instead of warming it up right. These services don’t work, folks. And even when they do, it only works while you’re paying them. As soon as you go back to sending to your less-than-stellar list without it being boosted by fake engagement, you’re back to square one…particularly with providers like Google and Yahoo, where recipient engagement has heavy influence on inbox placement.

Speaking of things that don’t work…

❌ Moving to a new IP or ESP instead of just fixing what’s not working. Mailbox providers are continually becoming more focused on domain reputation. Case in point: the biggest ones like Google and Yahoo are now requiring you to authenticate your sending domain if you want to reach the inboxes of their users.

This means it’s a lot harder to hide your bad behavior than it used to be…particularly when every email you send promoting your business is gonna have your brand’s digital fingerprints all over it. Running, hiding, no longer really an option.

❌ Using list validation services to continually clean up a poorly built list instead of improving your list collection practices. It’s like putting a band-aid on a bullet wound. It may seem practical in a pinch, but it’s not very effective. And the email validation version is a lot more expensive than a band-aid.

We’ll go deeper into what list validation (also sometimes called list verification) can and can’t do in a future lesson…for now, just keep in mind that cleaning up a list cannot replace getting actual permission from recipients, and it will never successfully remove all the spam traps on your list — no matter what their sales team tells you. Spam traps are like Pokémon…try as you might, you’ll never catch ‘em all.

Shortcuts…or longcuts?

When it comes to email, take the highways, not the byways.

Don't get me wrong, takin’ shortcuts helped me learn the area where I grew up like the back of my hand — better than most cab drivers knew how to navigate NYC before Google maps and Waze. But we’d also end up burnin’ more gas, us kids would be stressed out from all the herkin’ and jerkin’ in the back seat (true story), and most of the time, it would actually take us longer to get where we were goin’...because we’d either hit another light, take a wrong turn, or get stuck behind a Sunday driver no matter what day of the week it was.

You’d learn a lot if you took an email shortcut, too…but it could cost you:

Distractions for employees
Increased staffing expenses
Customer churn
Less revenue
Impacts on your health

Maybe just wait those additional 45 seconds at the light. A few suggestions…

Shortcuts to avoid

I told you my family loves shortcuts, yeah? Well, let me tell you…we once saw a doozie of a shortcut on the map while vacationing in Arizona. Looked like a main road, and it was a direct path to our destination! Silly Mapquest, taking us so far out of the way. 🙄

So, we exited the highway, which dropped down to a 2-lane road, which turned into a country lane, which then turned into a gravel path, which ended up being too tight to turn around on by the time it turned into a dirt path with a heavy decline. Whiiiiich meant we caught some strange looks as our rented minivan lurched past a bunch of tourists on a Jeep trail before getting dumped out into a neighborhood on the outskirts of Sedona.

via GIPHY

Loooots of cliffs. SO much dust. Ask my parents today and they’ll confess they thought we might all die. I actually kissed the ground when we got out of the van.

My point? Unknown, untested, “looks good on paper” shortcuts are rarely as good of an idea as they seem. Particularly from a deliverability perspective, which is conservative by default, the risk isn’t worth the reward.

A few shortcuts to avoid if you care about consistent inbox placement:

❌ Sending email without permission.

It’s like robbin' a bank and just as dangerous (to your deliverability). Maybe you get away with that cold hard cash, for now...until the dye pack goes off in the bag or the cops catch up with you for runnin’ your mouth down at the local horse track.

Put simply, sending to people who aren’t expecting to hear from you is the most common reason for spam complaints, which are verrrry damaging to deliverability.

❌ Following best practices just for the heck of it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m an advocate for following best practices. But there are so many vendors out there who’ve told you it’s essential to do XYZ, not because it’s oh-so-important, but more so because it’s helping them keep the lights on in their…home office? (Let’s face it, most of us are remote in this industry.)

For example, running addresses through a list validation service quarterly even though you mail to them several times a week. You don’t need to pay to validate those addresses because if they weren’t valid, they would have hard bounced already!

Here are the main reasons to adopt a best practice:

It’s required by law. For example, CAN-SPAM, CASL (Canadian Anti-Spam Law), GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), and CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act), just to name a few.
It’s required by mailbox providers your business sends to. For example, Yahoo and Google’s (semi) new sender requirements.
Your data supports the fact that doing that thing is helping you reach your goals. For example, if you see spam complaints go down and revenue goes UP when sending to recipients who’ve opted in vs those who haven’t.
It’s in the best interest of the humans you’re sending to. For this one, reference your own reaction as a recipient when you receive something you deem to be spam (even when you’ve signed up for it).

Regardless of your primary reason for following any certain practice, having a good understanding of why you're doing what you’re doing and how those activities are helping you achieve (or miss) your goals will help you better understand (and communicate!) the impacts email is having on your business.

❌ Batching and blasting without reviewing the aftermath.

You’ve goooootta review the tapes any time you’re sending email. What went well, and what didn’t? Athletes do it. Email athletes like you and me should, too!

Did it get delivered? If not, is it because you’re sending to invalid addresses or do you have an issue with sender reputation?
Did it go to the inbox? Last week’s lesson was all about why answering this question can be tricky, but there are ways to gauge whether you’re (likely) going to the inbox or the spam folder. For example, by reviewing your open rates at the destination level (e.g. Gmail vs Hotmail vs any other destination you send to). I talk about that at length (with the help of some email industry smarties, Drew Price, Jaina Mistry, and Travis Hazleton) in this article for the SocketLabs blog.
How did recipients engage? Positively, by opening, clicking, replying, and/or makin’ your business some money — or negatively, by marking your email as spam or creating a post on LinkedIn calling you out for bad behavior? Mailbox providers care a lot about recipient engagement these days, so this one’s important to pay attention to.
What can you do to inch those results a little bit further in the right direction? Lots of things, probably. But what does your data tell you is the most impactful thing you can do first? Dig in to find out. Or come talk to me and we’ll dig in together! I love email data. 💌

❌ Paying for shortcuts!

There are…so many options in this category. And I admit, they can be tempting. But these folks are selling snake oil!

NEVER pay anyone money when they’re claiming to guarantee inbox placement or, really, anything else related to email. There are a lot of plates spinning and sometimes one of ‘em falls, even in the best of circumstances. That’s email for ya’.

A few things to save your money on:

Warmup services claiming to raise your sender reputation by positively interacting with your emails. Mailbox providers can tell those are fake engagements, and even when they can’t, as soon as you stop paying for those services, your reputation will fall to wherever it actually deserves to be.
Tricks for landing in the primary tab instead of the “dreaded promotions tab”. If you’re sending promotional mail, you belong in the promotions tab. End of story. (Today, anyway…here are several thoughts I had about it recently, which I shared with Sella Yoffe on his Email Geeks Show podcast.)
Consultants, agencies, or tech vendors who tell you the path to email success is…something that doesn’t sound right, such as registering 10 domains — none of which are your actual company’s website — and swapping them out when you burn one. That’s…not a viable, long-term solution. And it’s a great way to seem untrustworthy to people you’re probably aiming to make your customers.

Reaching the inbox is super complex — there are 100’s of factors potentially affecting what happens to an email in between the time you send it and the time it lands in an inbox (or gets rejected).

But reaching the inbox is actually also very simple: send with transparency, accountability, and a genuine interest in making your recipients’ lives better (...easier, happier, whatevs), and you should have very little issue reaching the inbox.

The best ways to do that are by choosing…

The safest, most effective routes to the inbox

We seldom have the luxury of starting from scratch, but there are ways to improve your list collection and management, one step at a time.

Before you know it, your list will be in tip top shape, just like Rocky Balboa at the end of a training montage.

via GIPHY

A couple of tips for taking the safest routes to the inbox:

Keep spam complaint rates low by getting permission before sending. Always. And setting Expectations about the content you’ll send at the point of sign-up.
Help ensure quality over quantity by protecting all subscription forms from bot abuse using a CAPTCHA (or CAPTCHA alternative) and consider a confirmed opt-in (COI) process or real-time validation (sometimes called “verification”).
Regularly spend time reviewing your engagement metrics to see what content your recipients enjoy most... and least. Identify the mail streams generating the most spam complaints. Hint: these might not be your largest-volume programs.
Trace campaigns causing blocklistings due to spam trap hits back to the source and plug up the hole(s) asap to avoid future spam complaints and listings stemming from list collection & maintenance issues.
Make the unsubscribe process easy! It’s required by mailbox providers like Google and Yahoo, but more importantly, it’s what’s right for subscribers. Plus, unsubscribes don’t actually hurt your deliverability (just your heart)!

You might find that sending it right means it takes you longer to grow your list. But you’ll get to your destination safely and successfully…every single time. And the people who’ve chosen to come along for the ride will be enthusiastically singin’ and playin’ eye spy with you.

Your future emails will thank you when they land in the inbox of welcoming recipients! 💌

🎶 You can go your own way 🎶

Email is a discipline with a lot of gray area. There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to the strategies or tactics that will be the most successful for your business. The practices I’ve shared today are the ones I’ve come to find are the most helpful (and harmful) to inbox success over the past 18 years of my career.

Your best bet is to spend time reviewing what’s required by local and global regulations in the regions you operate in, what’s required by the mailbox providers you send to, and for the love of all things email, follow your data to know the best ways to send it right!