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- 2025 Inboxing Secrets! 📥
Happy New Year my friends!!!
Hopefully, you had a fun-filled evening with family and friends and didn’t overdue it too much.
Because of my Cuban heritage, we have a New Year’s tradition where we eat 12 grapes on the New Year to bring luck and prosperity for each month of the year.
I decided to honor the tradition by providing my 12 tips for mastering your email game.
One tip, for each grape, for each month of the year.
Are you ready? Let’s go!
Here are the 12 Expert Tips to Master Your Email Game
Now that you’ve consumed your 12 grapes and are destined to have the best year ever, follow these tips below to dominate the Inbox.
1) Verify that your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for your sending domain are set up correctly.
Email sender requirements for Google and Yahoo clearly state that you must have valid email authentication using SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for your sending domain.
👉 Click Here for full instructions on how to confirm and/or set up these records for your sending domain.
2) Clean and validate your email list for undeliverable emails and bad actors like spam traps.
If you have never used an email validation service to validate the emails on your email list it’s time for a little spring cleaning (Yes, I know it’s winter right now).
👉 Click Here for a brief article on list hygiene.
3) Create and send to a base sending segment of your most engaged and newly added subscribers.
You should never just send to your entire list. You should have a base sending segment established which will automatically purge unengaged subscribers that add no value but can hurt your deliverability.
👉 Click Here for my article which breaks down the base sending segment for you.
4) Clearly brand your emails with a from name, brand email address, and throughout the header and footer of your emails.
Make sure you are consistent with your branding across all aspects of your email campaigns.
Your from name should be specific to your brand, the from email address should be from your brand’s domain, and your logo should be included within the email to easily identify to your subscribers who you are.
5) Stay consistent with the time and cadence of your broadcasted email sends.
You must stay consistent with your delivery schedule so that ISPs like Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Verizon, Comcast, and Microsoft can monitor your sending habits.
They track your volume, frequency of sends, times of sending, and what you send into their deliverability algorithms.
For this reason, all broadcast emails should have a set schedule and time for delivery.
Your triggered, transactional, and automated emails can be sent as needed, as they are one-to-one deliveries rather than bulk sends.
6) Make sure you are always CAN-SPAM compliant.
To be CAN-SPAM compliant make sure you follow the rules below.
Don’t use false or misleading header information
Don’t use deceptive subject lines
Identify the message as an ad
Tell recipients where you’re located
Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future marketing emails from you
Remember that subscribers and members can opt out of marketing emails, too
Honor opt-out requests promptly
Monitor what others are doing on your behalf
NOTE: There are zero opt-in requirements in the CAN-SPAM Act.
7) Monitor that your complaint rates stay below the industry standard of 0.10%.
Google as well as Yahoo Postmaster requirements state that you should have complaint rates below 0.3%.
The industry standard has always been 0.10%, so if you want the best chances of keeping your domain reputation up and hitting the inbox, let’s stick with what we always considered to be standard.
8) Monitor your engagement metrics by domain group to identify deliverability issues immediately.
Because each ISP manages its own inboxes you need to know how your emails are delivered by domain group vs as a whole.
You must be able to identify if a domain group is having deliverability issues so you can adjust your sending segment to improve that group’s engagement metrics.
👉 Click Here for a detailed breakdown of how to monitor different domain groups.
9) Re-engage inactive subscribers who have fallen off your base sending segment but are still active.
What’s the old adage? It costs less to retain a customer than to acquire a new one. The same can be said with the active subscribers on your email list.
If subscribers have stopped engaging, but have never unsubscribed then these people should be re-targeted to try to get them interacting again.
You’ll have a better chance of these people engaging then new subscribers who haven’t engaged with your brand yet.
Click Here and scroll down passed the base sending segment to learn how to set up a re-engagement segment.
10) Eliminate bots from your email lists to enhance the quality of your list.
Bots can be detrimental to the quality of your email list.
Not only will they heavily skew your engagement stats (in a bad way), but they can also drastically hurt your monetization.
If advertisers are being sold on the engagement of your list, but the bulk of those engaged subscribers are bots, the campaign will not perform based on their expectations.
👉 Click Here for a detailed breakdown of fighting bots.
11) Use click triggers to send more emails with a much higher engagement rate.
To increase the amount of positive engagement signals you sen the inbox providers you can implement a click trigger technique which will send emails to your subscriber as soon as they click a link in one of your emails.
This email will be sent to them immediately at the same time they are still in their inbox.
Click-triggered emails have extremely high engagement rates vs the bulk broadcast emails that are regularly scheduled to go out.
The additional engagement signals will help your overall sender reputation.
Would you like a breakdown of how click triggered emails work? |
12) Remember… Patience is key.
You can easily kill your domain reputation twice as fast as you can fix it.
If your having problems hitting the inbox follow the best practices to get you back on track and stay the course.
👉 Click Here to learn how to increase your domain reputation in 4 easy steps!
There you have it…
You might not have had 12 grapes last night, but follow these tips in 2025, and you will surely hit the inbox.
Having problems with deliverability? Reply to this email and let me know what issue you are having.
Have a great day and a banging 2025,
Chris Miquel
Co-Founder of SoVi Digital
Follow me on Twitter: @miqchris
and on LinkedIn: chrismiquel
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