Email Deliverability Myths and How to Truly Get your Email to the Inbox

Common misconceptions about what it takes to get your email to the inbox.

As B2B digital marketers, we strive to get our emails sent to our customers. We want them to open it and read it and act upon it. But recently, we’ve been seeing a decline in the click-through rates and the open rates of our emails. What could be going wrong? Why are these emails not being opened? What are these email deliverability myths and how can you truly get your email to your customer’s inbox?

In this episode, Tom Kulzer shares the most basic yet vital part of your email marketing strategy – humanness. Your customers are people, and you need to engage with them like people.

According to Tom, “Don’t get so caught up in the individual mechanics and the metrics. Do things that users care about and want to engage with, and at the end of the day, you’ll have a successful email marketing strategy.”

Tom Kulzer is the founder and Chief Executive Officer at AWeber, the leading email marketing and automation platform for small businesses, where he is actively involved in the company’s strategic direction, growth, and evolution. Over the company’s 20-year history, Tom has nurtured AWeber from a small start-up to a robust organization, that has enabled over 1 million customers to grow their businesses, all without public or venture funding.

Tom laid the foundation for AWeber while working at a computer hardware firm in the mid-1990s, where he realized sales prospects were falling through the cracks due to lack of proper follow-up. By automating the delivery of personalized follow-up emails to prospects, company-wide sales skyrocketed, and sales associates had additional time to spend pursuing new prospects.

Podcast Timestamps/Outline

02:00 – Introduction

02:45 – About Tom Kulzer and AWeber

04:41 – The three pillars of email marketing

09:08 – How do you fix or solve the challenges faced by most entrepreneurs on the declining click-through rates and email deliverability?

16:12 – The importance of strategy in email marketing

19:39 – Things to consider in email automation

23:57 – Things to consider to make your email marketing effective

29:41 – Effects of the shift from traditional marketing to digital marketing for B2B organizations

33:29 – How to effectively use something like a newsletter

35:29 – Where does email fit in an omni marketing strategy

41:40 – The number one thing B2B digital marketers should be thinking about right now

45:30 – Tom’s goals for AWeber

47:30 – Connect with Tom Kulzer

Memorable Quotes

“At the end of the day, it’s about doing something and something is always better than nothing.” 

“A lot of people get really paralyzed in making sure that they are doing something perfect rather than doing anything at all.”

“What people need to do to be successful is to start and do something first and then dive into deeper learning.”

“People think of email marketing as they need to sell something. Email, when it’s most effective, can be a great sales tool, but it’s also a really great educational tool.”

“If you’re thinking about what is connecting with your audience and thinking about that individual user at the other end, we’d all have better email marketing programs and better email response overall.”

“Email is still one of the most effective ways of marketing and selling what it is that you do.”

“Don’t get so caught up in the individual mechanics and the metrics. Do things that users care about and want to engage with, and you’ll have a successful email program at the end of the day.”

“It really goes down to talking like a human and making sure that the stuff that you’re sending actually is connecting with people and you’re not just throwing brochures over the wall and hoping for the best.”

Episode Links and Resources

Aweber website: https://www.aweber.com/ 

Tom’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/tkulzer 

Tom’s email: [email protected]

Tom’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomkulzer/ 

Digital activity ROI assessment: https://b2bdm.com/digital-activity-roi/ 

More episodes related to relationships and trust: https://b2bdm.com/relationships-and-trust/