In this edition:

→  How to get out of the promotions tab

→  Inheriting a bad email strategy, approach or programme: A 90-day plan (scroll to blogs)

→  How to never run out of email content again (scroll to end)

→  How to spot email deliverability red flags  (scroll to end)

Hope life is good and you are good! 

I've been trying to survive a house renovation, a million projects, trying to exercise and do all that stuff you're supposed to - so writing this with a tired brain in my old room at my mum's house and highly caffeinated up, so this should be FUN 

Did you know? 🤔

It's totally normal (and acceptable) for up to 15% of the emails you send to land in spam. It happens to the best of us. And this email is somewhere in someone's spam 😱

How to get out of the promotions tab

Is it possible? Should you bother? 

Let's cut straight to it: Can you get out of the Promotions tab?

Partially, for some subscribers, never for all of them.

Tab classification is generated per-user and also by patterns in your sending 

It is possible that the same email lands in Primary for one person and Promotions for another on the same day.

There is no domain-wide fix. Anyone promising you one is selling a DREAM 

Should you bother?

Depends what kind of sender YOU are

→ Newsletter, personal brand, relationship-led B2B? Yes. Your content belongs in Primary

→ Ecommerce, offers, deals, promotions? Probably not. 

→ Mixed approach? Split the streams - separate subdomains and from names for transactional, editorial and promotional mail. Let each build its own reputation.

VERY IMPORTANT:

Promotions placement generates roughly half the spam complaints that Primary placement does.

People are more forgiving of marketing where marketing belongs. A subscriber who finds a promotional email in their Primary tab is more likely to hit spam than one who finds it exactly where they expected it- in Promotions.

Being in the promotions tab is VERY good for your sender reputation. 

How do providers decide if you go to the promo or other folders:

→ That specific recipient's history with you - opens, clicks, replies, whether they've dragged you to Primary before. The strongest signal by far.

→ Your domain's overall sending pattern

→ Content and structure - image-heavy, lots of links, multi-column = commercial. Text-dominant, conversational = personal.

→ Your reply-to address - if it doesn't match your from address, that nudges you away from personal correspondence

You can read how each provider does it in the full piece 

New subscribers are your real opportunity; the classifier has no history with them yet - I break it down in the guide

What you can do to start getting your emails out of the promotion tab (where relevant, your sales heavy emails won't be going anywhere):

→ Suppress long-term unengaged contacts 

→ Segment hard by engagement and treat cohorts differently

→ Separate your sending streams if you haven't already

There is SO much to dig into on this top, so I've broken it all down below for you. 

LEARN: Useful training and masterclasses

BRAND NEW: EMAIL PSYCHOLOGY MASTERCLASS 🧠

How do people actually think, decide and act in the inbox? What makes them notice you, trust you, ignore you - and act? 

9 SEPTEMBER: EMAIL DESIGN MASTERCLASS 

Learn the science of email design, layout and structure. 

EMAIL STRATEGY MASTERCLASS (register your interest)

If enough people register their interest for this it's on. And everyone who registers their interest gets free access to the Email Strategy Builder - a tool I'm building that gives you all the building blocks to build your own email strategy based on my award winning framework. 

From the Vault

A blog a day keeps the spam filter away 

⌚ 4 min read:

→  Inheriting a bad email strategy, approach or programme: A 90-day plan

⌚ 5 min read:

→  How to come up with email content when you've run out of ideas

⌚ 6 min read:

→  Email Accessibility and the European Accessibility Act: What It Is, Who It Affects, and What to Do About It

From the Queen’s Court

Voiceover video verdicts 

79 REAL emails reviewed 

Listen or watch

The Inbox Drop

How to never run out of email content again

Every single week I make time no matter how busy I am to create content for you 

And I know I will NEVER run out of ideas because I have a very easy, simple thing I do every quarter 

Start with:

Building a bank of questions, NOT ideas

Every email worth sending answers a question/need/problem somebody has.

So start there: what questions does your audience have?

Different segments and groups of your audience will have different questions: ones they think, ones they say out loud, ones that sound like questions but are objections

You can find these EVERYWHERE. On your CRM data, calls transcripts, reddit, social media, replies to emails, surveys, market research - they are everywhere.

You can also become your audience - what questions could they have? 

So start there - create 100 questions that your audience has.

TFDS 

I love TFDS (thinking, feeling, doing, saying) - it's a brilliant framework for coming up with email ideas and email flows. 

I would recommend reading this piece first if you don't know what it is! 

Read this and then do the exercise

As always, there is SO much I want to tell you about on this topic, and I go into detail and have a 2-part exercise that covers how to capture these questions and then multiply into ideas - it's relevant for ANY type of business.

Quick win for you

How to spot email deliverability red flags

This 👆 up there is a snippet from my free deliverability training slides, and this is your spam placement rate (how many of your emails land in spam) benchmark guide.

I can't tell you HOW many times I work with a new business and team and their opens are 'healthy', clicks are 'healthy', but they are sitting in the over 26% spam placement bucket. 

So here's your quick win - a 5-minute red flag check

🚩 Have you ever bought, rented, or scraped a list?
🚩 Are you sending to data that hasn't engaged with emails for 12+ months?
🚩 Do you know where every contact on your list actually came from?
🚩 Are you sending cold outreach, marketing, any other emails, and transactional mail from the same domain?
🚩 Have you recently migrated ESP, changed domain, or jumped in send volume?

🚩 Can one email send be to more than 100,000 contacts 

🚩 Do you do more calendar-based sends than email flows? 

🚩 Do you have an exclusion strategy? (red flag if not) 

If you have more than 3 of these red flags, your deliverability may not be tip top! 

Now check your data:

→ Pull your open and click rates for the last 12 months. Look at the trend, not the average. Up or DOWN? 

→ Has there been an overnight drop you wrote off as a bad send?

→ Has anyone - a customer, a colleague, anyone, ever mentioned your emails going to their spam? 

The only way to know your true number is to run a audit, because your email service provider won't show you.

2027 projects 

Work with me in 2027

If you're thinking about email strategy, deliverability, HubSpot, or training for next year - now is the time to have the conversation.

I work with a small number of clients at any one time, which means availability fills up. If you want to work together in 2027.

Give more than ask, learn to sell and write for a human!

Same time next week? 

Beth ✌️

I have ADHD (IFYKYK) so please excuse any typos and spelling errors in this email.

What did you think about this email?

Know someone who needs this in their inbox? Send them here.