Deliverability Defined

You may think it's too soon to talk about holiday promotions, but for email marketing, the time is now! The holidays often involve the biggest promotions of the year, so it’s important to plan your strategy well ahead of time.  For many senders, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the biggest days of the year in terms of promotions and sales. But without proper preparation, senders can run into deli...

There are a lot of email service providers (ESPs) out there and many misconceptions about how to choose the one that works for your needs. To understand what an ESP can and can’t do to help you with deliverability, it’s good to start by looking at the function of an ESP and the role it plays in your email marketing.  While each ESP has its own specialty, its main purpose is to help email marketers...

Today we’re talking about list validation. And to help bring some additional insight to our conversation, we’re joined by Lauren Meyer, the VP of Industry Relations and Compliance at Kickbox, a list verification company. With a background in communication and email deliverability, Lauren brings a lot of experience to the table.  We discuss spam traps, list validation, and some great ideas for keep...

Blocklist is a cryptic word that can cause panic for an email sender. No one wants to be “blocked” from sending an email. It can be complex, but it’s important to know how blocklists work to ensure that you remain in good standing as a sender. In this episode, we unravel blocklists and how to not end up on one. Main Takeaways A blocklist is an organization that compiles a list of IPs, (potentially...

If you’re following the email marketing world, you’ve undoubtedly heard of Hey.com from creators of Basecamp. A lot of people have a lot of opinions on Hey, and because our podcast is all about email deliverability, we believe it’s a relevant discussion for us to have. There’s not a ton of innovation in the email space, so having something like Hey to give us good conversation is a welcome change....

Open rates are an emotional, yet somewhat unreliable metric. When people see a drop in open rate, they tend to think it’s an indication that engagement is down. But email metrics go well beyond open rates. And in many cases, other metrics can tell you much more about the success of your email marketing than open rates alone.  In this episode, we talk about the meaningful metrics you should be trac...

Email authentication is probably something you don’t spend a lot of time thinking about. But it’s important that you understand what it is and why it's crucial for your email deliverability.  This episode gets a little technical, but if you’re sending emails to a list, you should become familiar with the jargon so you can leverage all of the options available to you when trying to improve your del...

Note: This podcast episode was pre-recorded and since then, we have changed our terminology at ConvertKit to blocklist instead of blacklist . Spam traps can elicit a negative gut reaction. It’s probably a natural reaction, and we’re going to talk about how you can avoid spam traps without making things worse.  Spam traps are an email address that's created or maintained with the purpose of identif...

Listbombing can be a touchy subject because most people think it’s personal. However, it doesn't really matter which email service provider you use or what your website is about—hackers will generally attack any list in any form on any provider that they can find.  That said, there are ways you can protect yourself from their malicious methods. Even though the sender isn’t the target of the attack...

Over the last few episodes, we’ve brought up the topic of content and have essentially talked around it. This show is about deliverability, but it’s surprising how much the content aspect of your emails and website can impact overall deliverability. Creating personal and engaging content for your emails cannot be overstated. Since your sender reputation has a lot riding on subscriber engagement, i...

Getting into your audience’s inbox all starts with sender reputation. It’s the most important factor when it comes to deliverability, and the domain you're using to send your emails is what holds the majority of that reputation.  Just because you end up in a spam folder doesn’t always mean you’re doing something wrong. And if you are, there are methods and strategies you can use to fix those issue...

Deliverability Defined is a new show from ConvertKit in which hosts Alyssa Dulin and Melissa Lambert help you navigate the complexities of email deliverability.  What exactly is email deliverability? And why is it important? Is email marketing still a good channel for communicating with your audience? If you rely on email for your business (or use it at all), these are important questions.  In tod...