Aligning Email Marketing Goals & Tactics – Get Email Opened
This year’s GURU 2025 conference was full of useful email marketing information, truth bombs and many useful tactics you can employ right now with your own email campaigns. What is the goal of it all? To get more people to receive and engage with your emails. Sounds easy, right? If it were, there wouldn’t be an entire conferences devoted to the subject. IYKYK.
Here are some takeaways, because some warrant repeating and some are new things to test:
Authentication
- DKIM
- SPF
- DMARC
These aren’t new things by any stretch, but email marketers are still trying to send emails from random domains to a list without these requirements. It is NOT optional. Even sophisticated spammers have DKIM/SPF/DMARC in place, so legitimate organizations need to ensure everything checks out. If you’re not sure, you can view the source of the email to view the authentication results.
In the Outlook desktop app, you can right click on the email when viewing your inbox…
… then click “View Source” to see the authentication results. All three authentication methods (DKIM/SPF/DMARC) should pass, like this example below highlighted in blue.
You can choose random emails in your inbox and spam folder, and you’ll see when some or all authentication fails. You’ll see more fails in your spam folder.
Also, having a DMARC policy in place with P=None was good enough before, but it’s time to tweak that value in your DNS to Quarantine or Reject. This will help you with inbox delivery to your email recipients.
Reputation
- IP address and domain reputation monitoring and addressing issues quickly (Complaints, blacklists, adjust frequency, etc.)
- BIMI (to increase trust of your brand with end recipient and therefore engagement, which trains junk folders on how to route your emails)
Use a good tool for monitoring your domain and IP reputation. I use MXToolBox and Sender Score.
BIMI is highly recommended as it helps your emails be perceived as legitimate in the inbox because there are additional hoops to jump through to allow your brand’s logo to show in the inbox preview for your recipients.
Subject Lines
Curiosity wins over clarity. Give people a reason to want to open the email. Also, trends seem to be used by many marketers at the same time, so do whatever everyone else IS NOT doing to draw the eye to your email. You can try:
- Using white space in the subject line/inbox preview – accomplished by intentionally filling hidden preview text with space characters (i.e.,  , which is the html character for a space)
- … Ellipse at the start
- Using preview text that pulls additional text into the inbox preview, adding context to the subject line
- Placing an emoji at the beginning or middle of the subject line instead of at the end
- Using keywords in the subject line in ALL CAPS, which works great when the keyword is in the middle of the subject line
- Using an assertive power verb as the first word (Stop, Fix, Quit, Delete, Add, End, etc.)
- Placing the last word in a phrase in brackets (instead of the first word)
- Using excessive punctuation between each word
Of course, you need to test what works for your audience. If you need help with email campaign creative or strategy, let’s talk.
