← Growth In Reverse: Newsletter & Email Growth
Growth In Reverse: Newsletter & Email Growth
The Seven Emails That Keep You Out of the Promotions Folder
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Welcome back to the Growth in Reverse podcast. No, this is not Chanel. My name is Dylan. I'm Chanel's co host on this pod. Today we are back with another teaser episode of the 30 Days of Growth series that's happening right now. You can go check it out at 30 Days of Growth co. And if you actually just recommend one other subscriber, you will get access to all 30 of these 30 Days of Growth private podcast episodes. Today we are talking about the seven emails that keep you out of the promotions full. This is how Tyler Cook uses a seven email welcome sequence to pull replies, train inboxes and filter for engaged subscribers. And spoiler alert, this welcome sequence helped one of his clients with 300,000 subscribers go from only reaching about 40% of those inboxes to over 90%. That means getting your emails into 150,000 more inboxes. I mean, that's pretty impressive. I think you will really enjoy this one.
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Welcome Back to the 30 days of growth. Today is day 16, the seven emails that keep you out of the promotions folder. How Tyler Cook used seven emails to pull replies, train inboxes, and filter for engaged subscribers did you know that the first few emails you send to your new subscriber are the ones the inbox algorithms pay the most attention to? Whether they engage with your welcome sequence or not truly matters. Their actions, or lack of, can impact things for every email you send them. Fortunately, there's a way to improve this experience for you and your new subscribers. Tyler Cook is a deliverability expert running a company called Hypermedia Marketing. Tyler gets called in when client sender reputations are already in trouble. One of his clients had a 300,000 person email list, but it was sitting at a sub 40% inbox placement before Tyler took over. That means that only 40 out of every 100 inboxes received his client's emails. The rest were going to spam or just never reaching anyone. That's not great. So Tyler rebuilt the client's welcome flow around a seven email sequence designed to pull replies, train the algorithms and filter for people who weren't going to engage anyway. The result? Deliverability climbed from sub 40% to above 90% as reported through Glock Apps, which is a tool that tests deliver deliverability. How Tyler does it well, I'm going to walk you through the seven emails he sent so you can kind of replicate this for yourself. Email one gets sent from someone who isn't the founder. The first email is less than 100 words, signed by an executive assistant or someone who isn't the C suite. The whole point is to guarantee inbox placement and pull a reply from them as fast as possible. A reply auto adds your email address to a contact in Gmail and Yahoo, which basically whitelists you forever. Email 2 is the actual welcome email, the one we all think of and call the welcome email. By the time email 2 arrives, email 1 has already interrupted the pattern of a typical onboarding sequence. That means that engagement on the welcome email itself tends to be higher than usual. People have already replied, they're already interested in what you have to say, and so when Email two hits their inbox, they're going to engage with it more regularly. Email number three pulls subscribers into a second channel. So he will introduce something like LinkedIn, Instagram or Twitter and say, hey, go follow me over there if you'd like to get content on that channel as well. It's a Super simple email. Email4 is a new subscriber survey. This is where you want to get all your first party data. He asks for content topics they might want, where they found him or who else they follow. That last question is gold because it's giving you some voice of customer research. If a bunch of subscribers follow the same person, that's where he's going to go after his next acquisition push to try and get more subscribers from that source. He bookends this flow with a Referral Ask on email 5 and on email 7. So the first one captures subscribers at peak engagement shortly after they've opted in. So he's asking them for a referral. Email6 is kind of the scary one. He's actually prompting people to unsubscribe. It's essentially saying, hey, you've gotten five emails from us. You know what we talk about. Here's the unsubscribe link. If this isn't for you and some people will leave, the ones that stay become significantly more invested. And as we talked about just A second ago, email7is another referral ask. So this one is a little sharper, often tied to a real incentive like a raffle or a gift card, and lands harder because email six just filtered out the most committed subscribers and email six just filtered for the most committed subscribers. So why does this work? Well, inbox algorithms treat the first week of a subscription like a probation period. Replies, contact ads, opens, clicks, anything like that during this window weighs more than the same signal three months in. The seven emails are basically engineered to generate those signals in a compressed time. The unsubscribed prompt is a surprising one. So Subscribers who stick around after being explicitly invited to leave are telling you they want the content. They open more and complain I. E. Mark as spam less. The survey converts strangers into something closer to readers. People who answer three questions about their interests already have invested 30 seconds and they engage more with whatever comes next. Results as we mentioned before, Tyler's client with that 300,000 subscriber list went from sub 40% inbox placement to above 90% replies in the first week. Effectively whitelist you. So this was super helpful. Now if you remember, we also talked about Voice of Customer research in both Justin's end of email question and Sam's video reply. So if you have been paying attention, this is extremely important in terms of email deliverability and just learning who your customer is. So how can you implement it well Step one Add an email sent from a non founder or more casual address with a single question that prompts replies. Keep it under a hundred words. The goal is a real human reply that lands in your inbox. Step 2 Move your existing welcome emails to email 2. The pattern interrupt from email 1 makes engagement on this one stronger. Step 3 Add a follow me here email that pushes subscribers to a secondary channel. STEP 4 Build a subscriber survey for email 4. Ask them three to five questions including who else do you follow on this topic? Step 5 Add a referral request for email 5 and an even sharper incentivized one for email 7. This captures peak engagement and the later one captures the most committed subscribers. Add an honest Unsubscribe prompt for email 6. Make it sincere. The people who stay are worth more than the ones who would have ghosted you later. Tools for this your email service provider so that you can set up these email sequences. MXToolbox.com is a great place to confirm that you have SPF, DKIM and DMARC setup, which are some technical ways to say that you need to get those set up before even trying to do this because that is going to have a bigger impact. Glock Apps or Inbox Monster are tools where you can see if your emails are actually landing in inboxes and tally or Typeform for the subscriber survey. The first week of a subscription is the strongest signal you'll ever have to an inbox provider that your relationship with a new reader is strong. A polite, welcome email kind of wastes that window. Whereas a 7 email sequence built around replies, surveys and asking for unsubscribes is how you build a list that's engaging a year down the road. You can follow Tyler over on LinkedIn or learn about hypermedia marketing at hypermediamarketing. Net. And I'll see you tomorrow.