Stop Email Marketing Disasters

What You Use It For

Before you send a marketing email, check for broken links, the spam score, or deliverability errors.

‍What You'll Love

So Simple to Use

• Right on the home page, there is a unique email address that you use to send your email to. After you send your test email, click the button for a full report.

Overall Email Score

• Your email is given an overall score out of ten. You can see right away if there is a problem with spam, authentication, deliverability, or links.
  

Specific Recommendations

• Within each main category that Mail-Tester checks, you can drill down for more detail. You are able to identify and remedy problems that will increase your score.

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Results Saved for 7 Days

• With the free version of this tool, your results will be accessible for 7 days. If you create an account, it will be available for 30 days.

What's Cool

My personal favorite feature is checking for broken links in the email. Avoid the dreaded correction email: "Oops! I sent the wrong link."

‍What You Can't Do

Even with a perfect 10 score, there is no guarantee that your email won't end up in a spam filter. For example, if a user has tagged your email as spam in their own mailbox, your emails will go to that user's spam.

‍Check It Out - Free at Mail-Tester.com

Method

Clean your data in Excel before sending out an email with personalization to avoid embarrassing, response-killing mistakes.

‍What You Need

• Excel

Steps

‍1. Decide on your personalization.

For this example, the personalized email will use two fields: <firstname>, <daysleftintrial>.</daysleftintrial></firstname>

‍Dear <firstname>,</firstname>

‍You have <daysleftintrial> days left. Why wait? Let's upgrade you now.</daysleftintrial>

‍2. Create an Excel spreadsheet.

Import the data fields you are going to use for your email personalization into your Excel spreadsheet.

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3. Fix capitalization.

To fix any capitalization errors in the FirstName field, use the Excel formula =PROPER(). This formula will capitalize the first letter of each word and make the remaining letters lowercase.

=PROPER('michele') = Michele

=PROPER('JESS') = Jess

=PROPER('MARy jOE') = Mary Joe

‍4. Use a fallback value for blank data.

Substitute "Subscriber" when the FirstName is blank so the email greeting is "Dear Subscriber".

To fix blank FirstName fields, use the =IF() formula. The =IF() formula allows you to conditionally populate a cell.

=IF(Something is True, then Do This, Else Do That).

Assume FirstName is in cell A2 of your spreadsheet. Here's how to replace a blank FirstName with "Subscriber", otherwise use the value of FirstName.

=IF(A2="","Subscriber",A2)

‍5. Clean up any negative numbers.

Since it doesn't make sense to have a negative number for DaysLeftInTrial, you can substitute the value "no more" using an =IF statement. Assume DaysLeftInTrial is in cell B2:

=IF(B2

‍6. Create new columns for your cleaned data.

You can combine and nest the Excel formulas to create your final spreadsheet.

Here's a view of the formulas for one row of the sample data:

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Here are the final results:

Advanced Tip

One very common oversight in email personalization is "plurals". In this example, the email is written "You have <daysleftintrial> days left". Notice that if DaysLeftInTrial = 1, the email would read "You have 1 days left." </daysleftintrial>

To fix this, you could use the FixedDaysLeftInTrial field to append either "day" or "days" depending on the value. The formula would be:

=IF(B2

Recently Loom went viral for their email marketing, but not for a good reason. Like so many other email marketers, they used a "no-reply" address to send their email. And it cost them.

"No-reply" addresses are used by email marketers to send out email blasts without a way to directly respond to that email. It may seem like a great way to avoid clogging up an inbox with bounces and out-of-office replies, but it is a big no-no. Email programs are so sophisticated now that you can set up rules and workflows to handle routing the incoming emails. There is no excuse to use a "no-reply" address.

Here's why to use a real email address that accepts incoming replies:

‍Authenticity

If you receive an email from a real person from a personal email address, it feels authentic. Receiving an email from an impersonal address such as noreply@ has a very chilling effect on authenticity.

‍Call-to-Action

Even if you have a huge bright button in your email that says "Contact Me" or "Buy Now", there are people who are going to want to reply directly to the email. Why would you take away a channel to make a sale?

‍Feedback

If someone has negative feedback, would you rather have them respond to you privately or would you rather have them tweet about it to the world? When you have the opportunity to hear negative feedback, you have to chance to correct it. Many times, when unhappy customers feel listened to, they turn into your biggest advocate.

Direct access to someone's inbox is a privilege. They have invited you to communicate with them, and that is very powerful.

Email marketing has a return on investment of $42 for every $1 spent. Email can create a positive brand image, boost credibility, and create a community.

Email can also be abused. This was the reason behind the CAN-SPAM Act. Here's a quick summary:

• Use a subject line that does not mislead.
• If your email is an ad, say so.
• Your sender information must be strictly true.
• You must provide a physical address.
• Make opting-out easy with an unsubscribe link.
  

We all know about email spam, which is unsolicited unwanted messages.

We all know about SPAM, the canned cooked pork introduced by Hormel Foods in 1937.

But do you know how unsolicited emails got to be named after a pork product?

We can thank Monty Python. Monty Python had a sketch about a restaurant that has SPAM in every dish to the dismay of the patrons who don't like SPAM. In very Monty Pythonesque style, a group of Vikings sing a song "Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam... Lovely Spam! Wonderful Spam!" The song is truly a masterpiece.

In the 1980s, the term Spam was adopted to describe certain abusive users on early web communities who would repeatedly type "spam" and Monty Python quotes in order to scroll other users' text off the screen.

It's interesting to see how certain names for things stick and become part of the global vocabulary.

I am thrilled to have AWeber as our first sponsor. I have been raving about the product and the people since using it to publish this newsletter.

Thank you for supporting Scrappy MarTech and helping small business and entrepreneurs grow.

So to celebrate our first sponsor, I'm giving away to one subscriber $10 'TisBest Charity Gift Card!

Use this gift card to donate to the nonprofit of your choice.

Look for the winner on my Twitter feed @revgabba sometime before January 25, 2021.

Michele Hsu

michele@revgabba.com

P.S. If you are interested in being an early sponsor of this newsletter, let me know.

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AWeber is an email marketing service focused on delighting entrepreneurs and small business.

‍Create

• Easy and powerful drag & drop email creation
• Prebuilt template library
• Smart Designer using AI to create branded emails in seconds

Deliver

• Industry leading email deliverability
• Pre-built reports & analytics

Grow

• Free migration services
• Powerful and easy list management
• Integrated sign-up forms
• Lots of integrations, including CRMs, e-commerce & Zapier

Entrepreneur & Small Business Friendly

AWeber is focused on helping small business, and it shows in the customer support, product features, and pricing.

The AWeber Free plan gives you a robust feature package for up to 500 subscribers, perfect for entrepreneurs and small business. There is no credit card and no payment required. The Pro Plan allows unlimited subscribers & full features for just $16.15/month.

Check It Out - Free at AWeber