The (simple) truth behind my 70% open rate

You buy your favourite bottle of hot sauce for your mate’s birthday, and almost immediately, you get an email about the founder’s family holiday.

They don’t know it yet, but they’re killing future sales.

When people mark your emails as SPAM, your sender reputation and email deliverability is impacted for ALL your emails. That’s right – it can stop emails arriving for those who want them!

At Virtual Assistant Lead Network, Australia’s premier jobs board for connecting business owners with virtual support, we understand that we can’t rely on social media and that our mailing list is way more valuable.

Email deliverability expert Mark Penney from Meppy told us, “If you ignore the rules set by email providers, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. Google’s changes in 2024 mean that list management is not optional.” I agree.

Here are five non-negotiables that keep our list growing and averaging rates of 98% deliverability, 70% opens, and 12% clicks.

1) Quality over Quantity

Measuring the success of your email marketing by the size of your mailing list is like judging a company’s success solely by its headcount.

A mailing list of 5,000 with a 10% open rate may look more impressive than 800 subscribers, but if 63% of those 800 are opening emails, then:

• Both lists hit the same number of eyeballs
• The extra effort and cost of growing the larger list was not worth it
• The 90% of the 5,000 subscribers ignoring emails are damaging the domain reputation and deliverability

Email providers like Google and Microsoft watch metrics like open rates and clicks closely.  If enough of their customers are ignoring your emails – or marking them as SPAM – the email provider may start automatically gatekeeping your emails for all their customers.

Chase quality content and quality subscribers.

2) List maintenance

Not everyone is going to buy from you, and that’s okay.  What’s not ok is letting dead weight stay on your list.

The Virtual Assistant Lead Network maintains a 70% open rate by ruthlessly removing anyone who has:

• not confirmed their subscription
• unsubscribed
• flagged SPAM
• not opened for six months

Automated lists for a VA make list maintenance and monitoring reasons for unsubscribing fast and easy.

3) Real and relevant

Don’t email for the sake of emailing; know who your ideal customer is, and write content for them.

Every piece of free content, whether practical or entertaining, should make your target customer think, “If this is the value I get for free, imagine how good their service/product will be”.

By maintaining content quality, you build an audience that trusts your brand and looks forward to opening your emails.

4) Segment your audience

You don’t give your mate a bottle of Carolina Reaper sauce when they only like mild food.  They’ll start rejecting your gifts.

Email lists work the same way.

Set expectations at the start, spelling out what subscribers get, and consider allowing them to opt out of certain topics or adjust the frequency of your emails.

For example, some of our subscribers want to hear about all the content we publish, while some only want to hear about VA work opportunities.

When your subscribers trust that you only send the content they’ve asked for, the chance of them opening your emails skyrockets and spam complaints will become a rarity.

5) Authenticate your domain

Time to get technical. Without proper domain authentication (using SPF, DKIM, and DMARC), even requested content can end up in spam folders.

Knowing how important it is to set these up correctly, we hired Mark Penney to check that we had all three records in place for everything that sends emails on behalf of our domain: our CRM, our website, and our Google Workspace account.

Many businesses only set up SPF records (missing DKIM and DMARC) or only authenticate their CRM.  Ensuring this one-time setup is done correctly is worth it.

For the love of hot sauce opened emails

Stop stressing about the size of your mailing list and focus on creating a lean, engaged list of quality subscribers that will protect your sender reputation and help your emails reach the inbox of your ideal customer.