As a regular reader here on wpfox, you will have noticed that I have been doing a lot of email marketing and newsletter distribution lately. However, I have not shared one (for me self-evident) tip with my readers so far – for whatever reason!
Because: Before I send out a newsletter, be it for a new project or customer, I ALWAYS test the mail for spam – and you can do that too, because it’s totally easy and on top of that for free!
Free spamtest at mail-tester.com
If you go to https://www.mail-tester.com/, you will find a randomly generated email address at @*.mail-tester.com. If you now send an email there, be it from your newsletter tool, your WordPress instance, or even from your normal email client, you can see an evaluation of your sent email by clicking on “and check the result”.
Ideally it should look like this: Perfect, you can send this email! 10 out of 10 points!
Thus the chance that your mails really end up in the inbox of your subscribers and not disappear in the spam folder is at least relatively high.
However, it should also be said that this is not yet a guarantee, because every domain and every sender has to earn his reputation first, i.e. regularly send mails that are not marked as spam by the recipients.
If you do not score 10/10 points in the test, you will find an explanation of what you need to change at each point. You should definitely do that then!
If you receive messages that someone has reported your mails as spam, you should immediately remove these recipients from your mailing list, as this can also damage your spam score. You should also take care of bounces, i.e. removing recipients from undeliverable email addresses.
Why should you test your email for spam?
Let’s face it, the email system is actually totally fucked. When it was invented, nobody expected that somebody would send millions of spam mails, so that in the end some sales of fake drugs or other dubious stuff would result. The email system therefore does not contain any sender verification mechanism or other layers of security to ensure that the sender is who they claim to be or to prevent someone from sending their advertisement to randomly generated or scraped or otherwise obtained email addresses.
That’s why anti-spam filters are becoming more and more aggressive and newsletters from reputable companies end up in spam folders more and more often! You can prevent this as far as possible with this tool.
Aren’t emails already dead?
Admittedly, email is really broken and inefficient for internal communication, for which there are better solutions such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, etc. But nobody can seriously deny that email is still critical for businesses and therefore far from being dead!
Email is still THE universal communication tool for work, because it is the easiest way to reach everyone you do business with. Every customer, partner, seller, investor or candidate has an email address. And unlike other technological tools, there are very few barriers to using email. It requires no special skills or knowledge, and it spans all generations of the workforce.
While the business use of email has shot through the roof, its efficiency has dropped dramatically. Whether it’s a crowded inbox or a lack of etiquette, for many professionals, managing email is the biggest annoyance of their daily work routine.
From spammers to unsolicited sales calls, many people feel the need to constantly rummage through irrelevant messages. It’s a challenge to find the things that matter in all that noise. Even the subject lines of emails and the formal style of letters can feel heavy and old-fashioned. Today’s employees increasingly opt for short, concise messages with emoticons and gifs.
Because email is heavy and asynchronous, internal back and forth over email can waste a lot of time and lead to slow decisions. Given the individual nature of traditional email, there is no way to share the burden with colleagues or loop in people without communication or forwarding, resulting in even more email. Internal discussions about the content of emails end up in long, confusing threads or are moved to other chat or project management platforms.
Synchronous communication/real-time communication (slack-like messages) will remain the method of choice for certain teams, but it cannot be the solution for all internal communication within the company and certainly not for communication with the outside world.
Conclusion: email will continue to play the central role in workplace communication.
Email will continue to play the central role in workplace communication. However, companies will complement it with a growing range of supporting tools and communication channels.
Email is still the standard for work communication, so it is not disappearing and can be used very effectively and meaningfully.
