There’s no better feeling than building a livelihood doing the work you love. For many creators, that means a life of painting, pottery, design, and left-brain thinking. But to succeed as a  full-time creator, you have to get technical every once in a while. If you’re not a numbers person and shy away from the analytical aspects of email and business marketing, ConvertKit has a built-in set of technical experts ready to explain. 

Enter Alyssa Dulin and Melissa Lambert, ConvertKit deliverability experts and hosts of the podcast Deliverability Defined. 

So what is deliverability? In simple terms, deliverability refers to the number of messages reaching your inbox versus the spam folder. Just like the post office, even though a letter or package is marked as “delivered”, that doesn’t always mean it’s sitting in your mailbox ready to be opened. Luckily, there are ways to resolve email deliverability issues and here at ConvertKit, Alyssa and Melissa are pros at helping creators solve those issues and reach the inboxes of their subscribers.

In this episode, Charli, Haley, and Miguel talk with Alyssa and Melissa about why deliverability matters, how to improve your sender reputation, why removing subscribers from your list is actually a great strategy, and how to embrace life’s (and email’s) technicalities. 

Key Takeaways

• [01:06] - Have you heard? 
  • [01:46] - Wordle was acquired by the New York Times.
  • [04:19] - An upcoming Apple update will turn every iPhone into a form of contactless payment. 
  • [05:28] - ConvertKit is conducting a survey about the creator economy. 
• [06:24] - Today’s main topic: Why Deliverability Matters.
  • [10:28] - Deliverability means the number of messages that go to the inbox versus the spam folder. Mailbox providers won’t tell you where they place a message so you have to use other metrics to determine your deliverability such as delivery rates and open rate trends.
  • [12:49] - ConvertKit doesn’t accept spammers or those with incredibly poor list health to protect the deliverability of other ConvertKit customers. 
  • [18:39] - Where your emails are placed is often based on your sender reputation. A “sender reputation” is determined by the “positive” and “negative” reactions of the people receiving your emails. 
  • [20:46] - When recipients engage with your emails (reply, click links, etc.), that’s a positive signal that boosts your sender reputation. Try to be creative with the strategies you employ to encourage engagement. 
  • [23:26] - Your sender reputation is tied to yourself as the sender as well as your ESP. However, your sending domain as the creator carries the most reputational weight. 
  • [27:20] - A DMARC record prevents spammers from using your sender domain or “spoofing.” 
  • [28:49] - Sometimes creators use a verified sending domain to help bolster and authenticate their sender status. To have an account with ConvertKit, you have to use a verified sending domain. 
  • [32:25] - Remove unengaged subscribers from your list every six months. It’s better to have a small list of highly engaged subscribers than a lengthy list of cold subscribers, for the sake of your deliverability and your bottom line.
• [36:11] - Creator callout! Laura Vanagaite is an amazing illustrator and branding expert who recently had some of her illustrations shared by great influencers.  
• [37:12] - A sneak peek at our next episode. 

Quotes

[18:54] - “Your sender reputation is very similar to a credit score. It’s very easy to damage and not as easy to build back up again.” ~ @mel_lambert_ 

[20:46] - “One thing we’ve been talking about a lot on this season of Deliverability Defined is those creative strategies to increase engagement. There are a lot of different ways you can encourage people to engage with your messages.” ~ @alyssa_dulin

[32:38] - “Keep a clean list. If you have never run any kind of cold subscriber re-engagement, if you’ve never cleaned your list before, that’s a really good place to start.  You just want to make sure that you’re sending to the people on your list who are most engaged. And if you aren’t, that can sometimes negatively impact your sender reputation.” ~ @mel_lambert_ 

Links

• Watch The Future Belongs to Creators on YouTube
• Wordle
• Josh Wardle
• Slack
• The New York Times
• The Future Belongs to Creators 145: How Wordle Went Viral (And What We Can Learn From It)
• Apple
• Stripe
• Shopify
• Fill out ConvertKit’s creator survey! 
• Deliverability Defined
• Monthly deliverability reports
• Gmail
• Microsoft
• Yahoo!
• Growth Currency
• Nordstrom
• Sign up for the Deliverability Defined monthly newsletter!
• Bitly
• DMARC
• YouTube
• Instagram
• Bitcoin
• Lara Vanagaite
• Justin Moore 

Connect with our hosts

• Charli Prangley
• Miguel Pou
• Haley Janicek

Stay in touch

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Instagram

Start building your audience for free

With ConvertKit landing pages, you can build a beautiful page for your project in just a few minutes. Choose colors, add photos, build a custom opt-in form, and add your copy. All without writing any code! Check out landingpages.new to get started.