In 1978, Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager at Digital Equipment Corporation, hit send on the very first email marketing blast, distributed via 400 Arpanet advertising machines.

And it did $13 million in sales!¹ That’s $51.9 million in today’s dollars!

To be fair, Thuerk had virtually no competition. Since 1978, the world has changed enormously.

Today in the email marketing game, everyone is your competition—spammers, moms emailing their kids, automatic updates, and of course, your actual industry competitors. Every time you land in an inbox, you’re competing for your prospect’s attention.

Deliverability

Deliverability is your percentage of emails that land in inboxes vs. spam folders.

In a technical sense, this is your highest goal. You want your email campaign to reach as many inboxes as possible. Email services like Gmail and Yahoo have spam filters, armed with algorithms that decide which emails are worthy of being ‘inboxed’ and which will be banished to spam folders.

There are surface-level rules, like penalties for too much bold text, all-caps, and exclamation points. (If you’re abusing these in your emails, STOP IT NOW!!!) Similarly, visual layout counts, so a professional design can improve not only the impression you make on readers, but also your deliverability.

Then there are technical, behind-the-scenes factors. For example—if you’re familiar with Search Engine Optimization—your email handle will receive a reputation score just as, in SEO, search engines rank the relevance or authority of your website. Over time, using common sense best practices and some technical know-how, you can grow your email reputation score and boost your deliverability.

Of course, your real highest goal, in a business sense, is to get Conversions. Sales. Dollars. Deliverability is the top of the funnel in email marketing. All other KPIs trickle down from there, namely: open rates, click-through rates, engagement, and (that’s right!) conversions.

Automation

Automation is how you program your email campaign to run most effectively.

Using an email management service, you can program all your pieces of email content to deploy exactly when you want, to the exact recipients you want. This means you don’t just make one email and blast it out to thousands of unsuspecting readers. (Gary Thuerk did it in 1978, but remember, he had no competition. Today it will get you blacklisted, doomed for spam folders.)

Automation takes some nuance and patience. To understand this, we have to back up and talk about segmentation.

You have a master list of email recipients. You can segment that list in a number of ways, including manual list-making and sorting by past engagement with your emails. Then you can use your different lists to strategically deploy emails. For example, suppose you send a weekly newsletter to a broad audience. After gathering data from those emails, you can target your most engaged audience with a special sales offer.

With the proper ongoing automation, and relevant content for the various parts of your audience, a little patience and a can-do attitude, you will boost your deliverability and the effectiveness of your email campaigns.

With all this talk of systems and automation, it’s important to remember—

Never take the marketer out of the marketing!

This is one of our central mantras here at Single Throw. In our digital world, it is entirely feasible to run a “set and forget” marketing campaign (we see it all the time).

But your prospects are real people, and even though there are screens, wires, and waves between us, we can never forget the human factor.

While digital tools give us unprecedented ability to monitor and automate campaigns, marketing efforts will largely fail without a human understanding to guide them—preferably an experienced human understanding.