Welcome to issue 80!
Firstly, you will have noticed that we’re doing this a little differently from this point forward.
Starting in issue 65, we sent out an email with all news, tips, tricks and hacks directly in the email – this started to cause us deliverability problems.
As far as we can tell (after much testing and head-scratching), if your email contains 3 or more links (even to the same content), then it is likely to go to the ‘promotions’ tab in Gmail (or worse, be sent to spam!).
So the answer is to just include a single link – course an email newsletter with just one link isn’t much fun..
So we have decided to go back to publishing the weekly newsletter directly here (in this secret section of the website just for subscribers 🤫), where we can use images, links, video embeds and… well anything we want now Big Brother Gmail isn’t judging us on everything we do.
OK, let’s dig into it.
01: Does your email really get to the inbox?
With almost half your subscribers using Gmail, there’s a good chance your lovely, well-written emails are going straight to the Promotions tab (or worse, the trash).
To be perfectly honest, getting this right is hard! We had a nightmare with issue 65-79 whcih resulting in most of our emails going to the Promotions folder, despite all the work we do around deliverability.
So we took a deep-dive into the murky, geeky world of Email Deliverability and translated it into a nightclub analogy.
We think it works. Just.
02: Writing good emails
You know who’s bad at writing good emails? Almost everyone. Know who’s great? Malcolm Gladwell!
Writing good copy (email content) is hard for us professionals, but it’s even harder for business owners who just-want-to-send-emails-to-sell-their-stuff.
The good news is that you don’t have to be an expert – you just need to learn the simple skill of organising your ideas in a logical way.
Gladwell has a brilliant masterclass on writing (that we’ve all been through), but if you haven’t got the time for yet another course, then this brilliant post sums up how you should think, in order to write great emails.
03: Infographics Pretty pictures that tell a story
What’s long, thin and makes readers go wild? No, not that. We’re talking about Infographics.
A few years ago, the only people who could create fancy data visualisations were the big companies who had in-house designers and plenty of time
Not any more.
Now, thanks to cool tools like Venngage.com and Canva, creating infographics is a 20 minute job (even if you have the design skills of a blind badger).
Our friends over at Buffer have summed up the best infographic tools & apps out there in a handy little guide.
04: Just for fun
If you’re anything like us, Better Call Saul is all we can talk about at the moment. Some of us (ahem, me) have even gone back and restarted Breaking Bad in a bid to get that ultra-nerdy insight into Vince Gilligan’s amazing characters.
If you’re the same as us, the why not try your hand at the ultimate Breaking Bad nerd quiz. (Warning – contains multiple spoilers!)
We got 31/50. Bit disappointed really.
That’s it for this week. See you next week!
Al Elliott & the Convert team