Email marketing is very popular and ticks practically every box in digital marketing. It’s nearly impossible to find a marketer who doesn’t use this channel.

And that’s not surprising. Email marketing can be made extremely personalized,. is highly cost-effective and can generate highly reliable metrics too.

For every dollar invested in email marketing, return can be as high as $38 – that’s a staggering return of 3800%!

So is email marketing a low-hanging fruit, available to anyone can write a few lines in an email?

Not quite.

To ensure such phenomenal returns, you’ll need to put in a lot of hard work and careful planning. Just like all the powerful methods to rank higher in search engine results need consistent efforts and understanding, email marketing is successful only when you know where you should be directing your resources.

The visible exercise to excel at email marketing

Email marketing requires efforts on two ends.

At one end, you have efforts that are aligned to everything that the recipient can see.

For instance, marketers go to great lengths in writing perfect copy for email. A lot of thinking and testing goes into using an image and if yes, the choice of image. Marketing, sales and other teams sit down together to figure out what offers can be designed to generate trial or re-purchase of products.

Then of course there’s the massive exercise to get the perfect subject line. Those 60 to 65 characters in the subject line can actually make or break the campaign.

All these – email copy, image, subject line etc – are the exteriors that are visible even to the recipient.

At the other end is the stuff that’s never seen by the recipient.

The invisible part of email marketing

A number of things need to be worked upon but are never visible to the recipient.

These things are like the engine of a car – important and necessary but

practically invisible, under the hood.

Here are the top 4 things you need to do under the hood, to make sure your email campaign turns out great:

1.  Warm up your IP address

We all remain careful and try to make sure we don’t fall for hacking tricks. The same applies to email servers – they try to protect recipients in many ways.

Your typical email account is neither designed to nor permitted to send out thousands and thousands of marketing emails. If you try to do so, your email account could be in trouble.

You’ll have to either use the services of a reliable email marketer or set up an email server yourself. This email server will have to be configured the right way to allow you to send thousands of emails in a matter of hours.

What you can do

To overcome this, you can use what marketers also call throttling. Begin by sending out emails in smaller numbers, using email addresses you know are correct and deliverable. The entire email system – basically Internet Service Provider (ISPs) and Email Service Provider (ESPs) – will notice your emails aren’t bouncing back undelivered.

As a result the system will start trusting your IP address. Gradually, you can increase the volume of emails going out.

2. Verify every single email address on your mailing list

Let’s understand why you need to verify the email address of all your recipients.

If you don’t verify the email addresses, there are high chances many addresses on your mailing list could have expired or changed, or there could be typos.

When you try sending emails to these addresses, your emails will bounce back. The ISPs notice this and – yes, you guessed it – begin suspecting you’re a spammer. So they will start punishing you, by deliberately not delivering some emails or delivering some of them to spam folders.

Either way, a number of your emails won’t ever be read and your campaign could fail.

A cleaned email list will prevent such issues.

How to verify these addresses

Just checking the syntax of the email addresses isn’t enough. That’s because it won’t tell you whether the email address exists; it will only tell you if the syntax is correct.

It is advisable to use specialized email verifier tools. These tools have a specialized software with which they can accurately and swiftly verify if the email address is valid or not. Many of them have freemium models so you can try them out.

To find out such tools, just google “email verification service”.

3. Authenticate your email

There’s a lot of phishing and other malicious attempts on the internet.  Naturally, email servers want to protect recipients from fraudulent emails

Unscrupulous people online try countless methods to dupe unsuspecting recipients. One of their favorite methods is to masquerade their emails so that the email appears to have originated from a reliable source (your bank, your government etc)..

To safeguard against this, email servers mostly filter out emails that aren’t authenticated and don’t carry enough evidence of being genuine.

What you can do about this

There are at least two things you’ve got to do.

1. Prove the sender is genuine.That means, if you are sending out emails from someone[at]google[dot]com, the email server must be convinced that google[dot]com actually sent the email. This can be done by using SPF (Sender Policy Framework) authentication.
2. Prove the message has not been tampered. You must convince email servers that the email message has not been altered in any way since the time it left the sending server. You can do this by getting DKIM (Domain Key Identified Mail).

If you wish to see if your email is authenticated, you can check the SPF/DKIM status of your email here.

4. Set the correct goals

Often you are digressed by some metrics that are actually not relevant to your goals.

Let’s say you write an email which was meant to get more signups for your free webinar. You even get a good response, so you start measuring whether there has been a corresponding rise in your revenue.

When you don’t see a corresponding rise, you come to the conclusion the email campaign failed.

What you don’t realize is the email was meant to just have people signup for your free webinar, not to boost sales.

Signup is an early stage of your sales funnel while revenue is one of the last. Because you mix up the two, your conclusion comes out incorrect.

What you can do

Quite simply, understand your goals and define them clearly. Next, identify what metrics you will use to verify if the goals have been met. Don’t be swayed by that once the campaign is underway.

Author Bio

Mayank Batavia has been writing about email marketing, data privacy, AI and technology. His technology blog http://almostism.com/ focuses on privacy regulations and the technology scene in China. He enjoys solving puzzles, re-reading Enid Blyton and giving up different forms of physical exercise after trying them for a couple of weeks.