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Why Your Prospects Never See Your Emails & How to Stand Out In The Inbox 

Not all email gets delivered

Are you sending emails to cold prospects?

If you’re not getting any responses, you’ve used some of our templates or something similar to build a foundation of trust with them, but you’re still not getting any responses, consider whether or not your emails are actually being delivered in the first place.

We take it as a given that when we take the time to write and send an email, that it’ll land in the recipient’s inbox. 

Like a phone call, we take it for granted that the number we dial ends up ringing the right number so the person on the other end has a chance to answer it.

With email, it’s not so straightforward. Unless you have a lot of experience sending emails for business, or you’re an internet marketer, you may or may not be aware of this fact:

Not all email gets delivered.

In fact, “according to the 2014 Sender Score Benchmark Report conducted by Return Path, only 28% of emails delivered worldwide make it to the inbox.”

That’s crazy!

There’s more. According to “an Email Statistics Report done by The Radicati Group, Inc. revealed that over 100 billion emails are sent and received per day, and the majority of that email traffic comes from business email.

Out of those billions of emails sent, 70% will not make it to the inbox because of low Sender Scores. Most interestingly, 2% of emails sent from the most reputable email senders will fail to reach their destination.” (source)

Why don’t emails get delivered? There are many factors that affect email deliverability: 

Relevant and interesting content (your email copy)

Enticing subject lines

Trust with the sender

Good design, if any

But there’s more to it than that. 

The sender’s score mentioned above for example, includes a whole list of various factors that the email provider looks at to determine whether or not your emails are spam (or not). Including:

  • Send volume
  • Spam complaints
  • Messages sent to unknown users
  • Subscriber engagement
  • Infrastructure
  • Spam trap hits
  • Content
  • And more…

How to Get More of Your Emails Delivered to the Inbox

1. Focus on Trust Building

First of all, you certainly want to make sure the focus of your messages is about building a relationship. Building trust with the prospect BEFORE jumping into a sales pitch is honestly the ONLY way to make it more likely that when they see your name in their inbox it’s not an immediate delete.

We’ve talked a lot about this before and how to achieve that through the type of content you share and the approach you take in your emails. Last week’s Marketing Minute includes some templates you can use as examples. 

But what about those looking to build stronger relationships and trust with their ideal prospects?

Or that want to take segments of their larger list and approach them in a way that has a more personal feel, gets delivered to your targets, and drives more consistent response?

Trust is at an all-time low.

Trust in the media. 

Trust in politicians.

Trust in corporations.

As an entrepreneur, marketer or salesperson, this is the landscape you are up against.

Distrust is so prevalent, The New York Times recently referred to the past decade as ‘The Decade of Distrust.’

But, with every problem, comes an opportunity.

Your audience is conditioned to receive this type of outreach from vendors and marketers. When you break the paradigm, you automatically stand out in the inbox.

Want to learn a system for building Trust with your best prospects over and over again?

2. Understand Your Email Autoresponder

If you’re in business at all, you’ve probably looked at a number of different email autoresponders to send mass emails to your prospects and clients. Automation makes sense. It’s the smart move, unless you want to send emails to all your prospects and clients individually.

It’s important to remember that the majority of email automation tools on the market (Mailchimp, ConstantContact, InfusionSoft, etc) are built for scale.

Their true value comes when you need to deliver tens of thousands of emails at once.

Because they spread your sending through their email servers, it allows you to deliver a large volume of messages to your subscribers.

But there’s a cost with that.

It limits where the emails are truly coming from.

It limits the audience you can reach out to (existing subscribers only).

It looks less personal (see: it looks like an automated email).

All of this is worth the cost when your volume is large.

But when you’ve got a relatively small audience that you want to reach and build trust with, even if they’ve never heard of you before, you need a specific type of email autoresponder. You need one that won’t trigger spam filters and that will actually get delivered to the inbox.

This is why we created Connect365 - as an easy option to help business owners jump through deliverability issues at the software level. 

Connect 365 offers a completely different and more personal kind of email marketing. It automatically builds trust with email providers AND helps you do so with your prospects in their inbox - because it doesn’t look like an automated email from those other autoresponders.

In other words, it’s great for prospecting, sales, and relationship building because emails sent through Connect 365 literally look like a personal email from your grandma (and everyone opens those, right?)

The difference is that while Infusionsoft uses Infusionsoft's server - Connect 365 piggy backs onto your gmail account and uses that to send the messages. The messages act in your prospect's inbox like you sent them personally. (Even though you used automation. Best of both worlds).

Connect 365 makes you look approachable and trustworthy and like an actual human (not a big company sending out impersonal mass emails just to get your money). 

But again, it goes deeper than that; on a technical level, your email provider registers personal emails differently - so Connect 365 emails get improved deliverability and engagement rates. 

In fact, we’ve seen in many cases that it can even double or even triple your open rates.

Also with Infusionsoft, prospects need to have opted in to receive emails from you via those services and because Connect 365 is for all intents and purposes a “personal message,” it does not require the recipient to have opted in. This means that you can send automated, personal looking messages to anybody, saving you the time of sending out the same message to several people individually.

3. Collect Quality Prospects

It goes without saying that you want to build a list of people who are interested in what you have to say. Obviously, that touches back on step 1: focus on trust building. So while you want to cater your content and emails to your prospect, you also want to make sure you’re attracting the right prospects.

When you have the right prospects and you’re speaking their language (ie you’re aware of their pains, interests, and even how they talk), you can connect. They’ll be more likely to open your emails.

On a deliverability level it goes deeper. 

Here is a great explanation -

“Keep in mind that the quality of your prospect base affects your deliverability rate to a very significant extent. There are two aspects you need to consider in this respect:

#1) Know who your prospects actually are. 

If you send your emails to people who are not interested in your offer, they can mark your message as spam. This doesn’t mean your offer is bad. It may just not be a good fit for the prospects you chose to contact.

According to ReturnPath, even if as little as 0.1% of your recipients manually mark your message as spam in their inbox, your emails will stop being delivered and you may land on a spam list. That’s just 1 angry prospect per 1000 messages sent (!). Now you should get why I always write about quality over quantity, personalization, and careful targeting.

#2) Make sure the data you collect is valid, especially the email addresses.”

Your Turn: How to Get Clients With Email

So, to sum up your goal to increase your email deliverability here is to do everything you can to build trust with the right prospects, including writing emails with content that’s relevant to your prospect (and that avoid sounding spammy) and to use the right tools for what you want to do.

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Ready For A Better, Simpler, Way to get high-paying clients on autopilot?

Request an invite to connect 365 and start building relationships with your best prospects with simple, streamlined automation.