Email can be tough to get right. Whether you are sending 100 or 10,000 emails, email is a preferred way supporters and prayer partners want to hear from you. Nothing can be more discouraging as losing subscribers of your newsletter not being delivered. Below are 7 tips to help you with your missionary communication.
But first, let’s discuss…
Spam
You should take this word and group it with the other bad four-letter words you know. You want to prevent your subscribers marking your emails as sp*m. Also, you need to make sure email companies (Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo, etc.) don’t think your emails are sp*m before they deliver them to your subscriber.
If a mailbox provider thinks you send sp*m, it means that they might not even show the message to the recipient. In recent years, Google also filed for a patent that will lower your search rankings if your website is associated with an email sender blacklist. You want to do everything you possibly can so your emails don’t get marked as or thought of as sp*m.
There are times when a subscriber will simply mark your email as sp*m because he’s having a bad day. There’s nothing you can do about that.
But, there are steps you can take to be a good sender and stay in touch. Here are some ideas so your important communication does go to the (dare I say the word?) sp*m folder. Here are 7 of them.
1. Get permission
Get people’s permission before adding them to a list or a new mailing list. People feel violated if you just subscribe them without their permission. Here’s my confession: I’ve done it before. Take it from a guy who’s been there and done that. Don’t do it! If you send emails to people who didn’t subscribe, you will get marked as sp*m.
2. Use an Email sending service
There are people who send out a PDF of their prayer letter and BCC everyone on their recipient list. If you are only communicating with 10-20 people, that might be all you need. But Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo, etc. aren’t made for mass email. You can quickly get in trouble with them if you aren’t careful.
From what I’ve seen, you can get your Gmail account temporarily deactivated is you send around 100 emails in a short span of time.
Take advantage of a bulk sending service. Most places will let you start with a free plan for 500-2000 subscribers. Even if you have to start paying, it is always worth it. Popular companies include MailChimp, SendinBlue, and Constant Contact. We use MailPoet, but it might not be for you if you are just starting out and don’t have a lot of subscribers.
3. Make it easy to sign up
This has nothing to do with sp*m, but it’s still important. No matter how much protection you have set up, if you don’t actually have people to send emails to, then it doesn’t matter.
Any email sending company you choose will allow you to create a signup form. You can put this on your website or send the signup link. If you have a tablet, there is usually way to get these forms on your device so you can hand them the tablet and they can sign up right there. People will be more likely to sign up if it is easy. You can subscribe to our emails by going to https://reachingjapan.com/subscribe/
4. Double-opt in
If someone signs up to your emails, make sure you send them a confirmation email that with a link to click before you regularly start sending to them. This is called Double Opt-In. If you don’t confirm their email address and there was a typo in the address, you will repeatedly send to an invalid address and email companies (Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo, etc.) can begin to think you are not a legitamate sender.
5. Give people options
Scenario: I regularly get email updates from missionaries and I’m totally cool with that. Most of those emails are ones that I signed up for. But if you do something weekly and monthly, chances are I just want one or the other, not both.
If you don’t provide a way for subscribers to stop receiving this type of email (verse of the week etc.), there are three possible outcomes. All of them affect YOU as a sender and how your messages are delivered.
Negative Result 1: Unsubscribe from ALL emails
This is the most drastic action a subscriber can take. It’s not unlikely. In the moment, they are annoyed that they got a message they didn’t sign up for. Since the subscriber can only be subscribed to Everything or Nothing, he goes with nothing. He might have have stayed on your list if you provided some options.
Congratulations. You just lost a subscriber.
But let’s say your your reader decides not to unsubscribe completely, in that case he can…
Negative Result 2: Mark your message as Sp*m
This isn’t AS drastic as result 1, but it has multiple negative consequences.
Your email sending company (MailChimp etc.) gets a report when someone marks your message as sp*m. This sp*m report negatively affects what is called your “Sender Reputation.” If your sender reputation drops too low, your mailing service (MailChimp etc.) can refuse to continue to sending emails for you.
All future emails to your subscriber are also affected. Email providers (Gmail etc.) track how their users interact with emails. If your subscriber marks a message as sp*m, future emails from you are even more likely to end up in the sp*m folder.
As if that isn’t enough, the inbox provider looks at sp*m reports and makes decisions about ALL the emails you send to ALL their users. So, Gmail could start flagging any message you send from you@yourwebsite.com no matter if your subscriber is JONdoe@gmail.com or JANEdoe@gmail.com. If multiple users mark your message as sp*m, you run the risk of ALL your future emails ending up in a sp*m folder.
All that time you spent in writing that letter is wasted. I’m not cool with that, and I’m sure you aren’t either.
Some people know that marking a message as sp*m has these consequences. In that case, your subscriber…
Negative Result 3: Doesn’t open the email
This isn’t quite as drastic as the other two, but it still negatively affects your emails. As I mentioned earlier, email providers track how people interact with emails. If someone consistently deletes emails from a specific sender without opening them, Gmail realizes that the user doesn’t care about those emails and starts sending them to the sp*m folder. It also means that the types of emails that your subscriber wants to see can end up in that dreaded sp*m folder as well.
Fix it
The ONLY way that you aren’t negatively affected by all this is if your subscriber continues to open emails from you that he KNOW he doesn’t want to open. That’s too big of a risk to take to be an effective communicator.
So, let’s get this out there. If you don’t have an option for subscribers to stop receiving a certain type of email (weekly update, verse of the week or whatever), you run the risk of your reader unsubscribing from ALL of your emails or marking the ones they don’t want as sp*m.
As a smart communicator, you need to allow people to choose how often then want to hear from you. Some people want everything you send but not everyone. Give people a choice. This will help you keep a larger audience, protect your reputation, and prevent your emails from being sent to the sp*m folder.
6. Clean your list (a lot)
Do you have a system in place to remove bad email addresses from your list? I have had multiple church emails go bad because they changed a domain name (pastor@example.church becoming pastor@examplechurch.com). The old email address is no longer valid and if you keep sending to it, you will be marked as sp*m. Now is the time to use a service like NeverBounce or ZeroBounce. These companies run a check on your list and tell you which ones are invalid.
You can also contact a person with technical knowhow so that you are notified when emails bounce. This way, you (or whoever takes care of your newsletter) can remove these bad addresses as you go.
7. Set up authentication
This is where things get a technical. You might need to hire someone to handle this for you.
Whatever service you use to send your newsletters (Mailchimp, Sendinblue, Constant Contact etc.), you need to make sure that Domain Authentication, SPF, and DMARC is set up.
I’m going to assume you are sending legitimate emails to legitimate subscribers. What Domain Authentication, SPF, and DMARC do is tell the receiving email inbox (Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo, etc.) that your sending company (Mailchimp, Sendinblue, Constant Contact etc.) is allowed to send on your behalf. Without these things set up, it looks like someone is pretending to be you and send email on your behalf. Essentially, it looks like digital forgery. This results in mailbox providers (Gmail etc.) flagging your emails as sp*m.
Have I mentioned how bad that is??
I highly recommend making your email “FROM” address an email address associated with your website. Mine is james@reachingjapan.com (here is what MailChimp says about this in case you’re curious).
When the “FROM” address website is yours, Domain authentication along with SPF and DMARC tells the receiver that the sending service (MailChimp or whatever) is authorized to send emails that say they are from you. This means your emails are more likely to end up where you intend for them to be: your prayer partner’s inbox.
Thoughts?
So there are 7 tips and strategies that you can implement as you communicate with prayer partners.
Are there other tips that you know of? If so, I’d love to hear about them. In no way am I the definitive authority on this, so please share share what you know in the comments below!