How to double your Gmail inbox placement rates

We all talk about the little tweaks we can do to help increase our inbox placement rates at the major ISPs like Gmail. But what if you are having trouble getting into the inbox at Gmail at all? What if we asked the question "how can I DOUBLE my inbox placement rates at Gmail"? AND, what if I further asked "why can't Loraine at our office not keep a simple Ficus tree alive?" Well it is possible to answer the first two questions, anyway. If you are willing to incorporate some personalization tactics that specifically target Gmail subscribers with their own campaign (and yes, this means doing some extra work), then you may be successful. If you aren't willing to do any extra work, then I've got a great piece of advice for you--> read someone else's blog : ).
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Double your Gmail inbox placements
If you have been paying any attention to your inbox placement rates at the ever-fickle Gmail, you have noticed a decrease which means your readers aren't reading your email anymore.
Two B2C retailers that depend on their email newsletters getting through to the inbox are ProFlowers and Shari's Berries. The Magill Report witnessed these retailers start sending out personalized emails intended just for Gmail subscribers. The subject lines of these emails were things like "Gmail Users Weekend Sales Event: 59% off a Gift Mom will Remember Forever". The results from these highly targeted campaigns were quite impressive. ProFlowers' Gmail inbox placement rate jumped from 35.9 percent to 71.8 percent (eDataSource).  And, in subsequent campaigns, the inbox rates were at 95%! Shari's Berrys also provided graphical instructions on how to report the email message as Not Spam (see the graphic below).

Click to enlarge

If you are having trouble sending to Gmail
First set up a few free Gmail test accounts to monitor what happens when your campaign are sent there and then try the below:

• Remove any subscriber from your list that has not opened/clicked one of your messages in the last 90 days
• Be sure your email service provider doesn't send your emails too quickly to Gmail.  A good ESP will know the appropriate speed.
• Use email authentication
• Use a spam check tool prior to launch to help spot problems
• Check with your ESP to ensure they participate in feedback loops*
• Check your Gmail test accounts and be sure that the emails are received, and that images are displayed.  If emails are not in the inbox, stop!  Don't send the rest of the campaign until you know what the problem is. You may be able to narrow down the problem:
• Send your campaign in small segments, dividing the content into two parts. 
• If both sections of your content fail to reach the inbox, continue dividing the content into smaller pieces and resend. Repeat this process with subsequently smaller sections of content until what content is driving the spam filtering issue. 

If your campaigns are still not reaching the inbox at Gmail, consider engaging the tools and services of inbox placement companies such as  Litmus, Email on Acid (yes!, that's actually the name of their company), Return Path, and Pivotal Veracity (IBM Unica Email Optimization).  They can help you see exactly what is happening with your emails and provide advice on what else you can do.

Read next: Gmail gives marketers a second chance
If you are still trying to send your bulk emails using Outlook, you may want to read this article

* Feedback loops are where the ESP receives the complaint list from the ISP of any recipients that clicked the Report Spam button. These subscribers should be automatically removed from your list. Gmail does not participate in feedback loops, but this is an important fact to know about your ESP.

ESP- email service provider
ISP- internet service provider

Why can't I do email marketing with Outlook?

Why can't I just use outlook to send bulk emails?

Let's start out this article on the right foot, shall we? Outlook sucks for sending marketing emails. Why? Because you are missing so many components that will make you successful. Outlook is fine for communicating with your customers and co-workers, but don't expect it to double as a "free" email marketing tool. Here's a list of some of the reasons Outlook won't work for sending bulk marketing email:

• Poor HTML! - Outlook uses Microsoft Word to create the html necessary to send out a nice looking email. The problem is that Word's creation of html is so bad that your email can get flagged as spam by the receiving email server which is looking for poorly formed html as a sign of a spammer. That's right, even the quality of your html is judged by spam tools.  Use a real email marketing product that forms proper html to avoid getting flagged as a spammer.
  
• No tracking of clicks or opens - If you don't know who is clicking and opening your emails, you don't know who your "engaged" subscribers are. Not knowing this important fact will get your emails blocked.  How? Email receivers automagically monitor how many of their customers are opening and clicking YOUR email. And, if not enough of them are engaging with your email, they start blocking you even if these recipients are double opt-in subscribers who love you dearly, and have sworn allegiance to you as Grand Poo-Bah. You should remove subscribers who are not engaged in the last 90-120 days or so. Outlook won't give you this info.
  
• No automatic bounce removal - how much time do you have on your hands? I have so much time on my hands that I write this blog during a time that I should be asleep.  In case that was too subtle, I don't have any free time.  And since time is not available to me, I certainly don't have time to manually remove every hard bounce that comes back to me, or every person that replies with "Unsubscribe" in the subject line.  That's why I use a real email tool that handles all that for me.
  
• BCC email looks like spam - if you use Outlook to send bulk email, and BCC a bunch of email addresses, receiving email servers greet your email with a nice, cheery, "Hello, you are spam, welcome to our spam box" greeting.  It looks like spam so it's treated like spam.
  
• No authentication - when you use Outlook to send your email, you are getting no email authentication.  What in the heck is email authentication?  These are technologies that tell the receiving email provider who you are, that you are announcing your identity and domain, and are doing so such that you couldn't possibly be a spammer.  When you use a real email marketing tool, they provide you with authentication technologies like DKIM, DomainKeys, SenderID, DMARC, and SPF.  Sometimes you need to also have your website guy do a little tweek to your domain record, but your email marketing tool will give you instructions on how to do this.  Let's put it this way, if you don't use email authentication, a huge amount of your email is being blocked at this very moment.  Your email isn't even reaching your subscribers.
  
• No control over unsubscribing - Not only do you have to manually handle unsubscribe requests, but your customers have no subscription preference center to opt in and out of the different emails that you offer.  What customers want is to see a pretty little webpage where they can check cute little boxes to indicate which bulk emails they want from you and which they don't.  If you're not using a real email marketing tool, your customers can't do this, and they pout profusely about it.
  
• No personalization - Finally, using Outlook for bulk email, how are you going to send an email that has personalization on it so it can say things like:  "Dear Mikey, as a kid, Life cereal was your favorite, and now it's Super Fiber Overblow, we'd like to offer you a 15% discount on your next order..."  Every field in red represents data from your database now being displayed as a merge field which would be automagically filled in with the information you have stored about your subscriber, Mikey. Think of how powerful this email message is instead of sending Mikey an email that says "Dear Customer, we use stupid Outlook to send bulk emails which means we can't personalize your email even though we know your favorite cereal, and so we can't offer you a discount on it."  If you use Outlook for sending marketing email, you get no personalization.

Hopefully you see the folly of doing email marketing with Outlook.  So use a real email tool instead. Take a look by signing up for a free account.