The Seven Emails That Keep You Out of the Promotions Folder
The Seven Emails That Keep You Out of the Promotions Folder
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Dylan Redekop: [00:00:00] Welcome back to the Growth in Reverse podcast. No, this is not Chenell. My name is Dylan. I'm Chenell's co-host on this pod. Today, we are back with another teaser episode of the 30 Days of Growth series that's happening right now. You can go check it out at 30daysofgrowth.co, and if you actually just recommend one other subscriber, you will get access to all 30 of these 30 Days of Growth private podcast episodes.
Today, we are talking about the seven emails that keep you out of the promotions folder. This is how Tyler Cook uses a seven email welcome sequence to pull replies, train inboxes, and filter for engaged subscribers. And spoiler alert, this welcome sequence helped one of his clients with 300,000 subscribers go from only reaching about 40% of those inboxes to over 90%.
That means getting your emails into 150,000 more inboxes. I mean, that's pretty impressive. I think you will really enjoy this [00:01:00] one.
Chenell Basilio: Welcome back to the Thirty Days of Growth. Today is day sixteen, The Seven Emails That Keep You Out of the Promotions Folder. How Tyler Cook used seven emails to pull replies, train inboxes, and filter for engaged subscribers. Did you know that the first few emails you send to your new subscriber are the ones the inbox algorithms pay the most attention to?
Whether they engage with your welcome sequence or not truly matters. Their actions, or lack of, can impact things for every email you send them. Fortunately, there's a way to improve this experience for you and your new subscribers. Tyler Cook is a deliverability expert running a company called Hypermedia Marketing.
Tyler gets called in when clients' sender reputations are already in trouble. One of his clients had a three hundred thousand person email list, but it was sitting at a sub forty percent inbox placement before Tyler took over. That means that only forty out of every one hundred inboxes received his client's emails.
The rest were going to spam or just never reaching anyone. That's not great. So Tyler [00:02:00] rebuilt the client's welcome flow around a seven email sequence designed to pull replies, train the algorithms, and filter for people who weren't going to engage anyway. The result, deliverability climbed from sub forty percent to above ninety percent, as reported through GlockApps, which is a tool that tests deliverability.
How Tyler does it. Well, I'm gonna walk you through the seven emails he sent, so you can kind of replicate this for yourself. Email one gets sent from someone who isn't the founder. The first email is less than a hundred words, signed by an executive assistant or someone who isn't the C-suite. The whole point is to guarantee inbox placement and pull a reply from them as fast as possible.
A reply auto adds your email address to a contact in Gmail and Yahoo, which basically whitelists you forever. Email two is the actual welcome email, the one we all think of and call the welcome email. By the time email two arrives, email one has already interrupted the pattern of a typical onboarding sequence.
That means that engagement on the welcome email itself tends to be [00:03:00] higher than usual. People have already replied. They're already interested in what you have to say, and so when email two hits their inbox, they're going to engage with it more regularly. Email number three pulls subscribers into a second channel.
So he will introduce something like LinkedIn, Instagram, or Twitter and say, "Hey, go follow me over there if you'd like to get content on that channel as well." It's a super simple email. Email four is a new subscriber survey. This is where you wanna get all your first party data. He asks for content topics they might want, where they found him, or who else they follow.
That last question is gold because it's giving you some voice of customer research. If a bunch of subscribers follow the same person, that's where he's going to go after his next acquisition push to try and get more subscribers from that source. He bookends this flow with a referral ask on email five and on email seven.
So the first one captures subscribers at peak engagement shortly after they've opted in, so he's asking them for a referral. [00:04:00] Email six is kind of the scary one. He's actually prompting people to unsubscribe. It's essentially saying if, "Hey, you've gotten five emails from us. You know what we talk about.
Here's the unsubscribe link if, if this isn't for you." And some people will leave. The ones that stay become significantly more invested. And as we talked about just a second ago, email seven is another referral ask. So this one is, is a little sharper, often tied to a real incentive like a raffle or a gift card, and lands harder because email six just filtered out the most committed subscribers.
And email six just filtered for the most committed subscribers. So why does this work? Well, inbox algorithms treat the first week of a subscription like a probation period. Replies, contact adds, opens, clicks, anything like that during this window weighs more than the same signal three months in. The seven emails are basically engineered to generate those signals in a compressed time.
The unsubscribe prompt is a surprising one. Subscribers who stick around after being [00:05:00] explicitly invited to leave are telling you they want the content. They open more and complain, i.e., marked as spam, less. The survey converts strangers into something closer to readers. People who answer three questions about their interests already have invested thirty seconds, and they engage more with whatever comes next.
Results, as we mentioned before, Tyler's client with that three hundred thousand subscriber list went from sub forty percent inbox placement to above ninety percent. Replies in the first week effectively whitelist you, so this was super helpful. Now, if you remember, we also talked about voice of customer research in both Justin's end of email question and Sam's video reply.
So if you have been paying attention, this is im- extremely important in terms of email deliverability and just learning who your customer is. So how can you implement it? Well, step one, add an email sent from a non-founder or more casual address with a single question that prompts replies. Keep it under a hundred words.
The goal is a real human [00:06:00] reply that lands in your inbox. Step two, move your existing welcome emails to email two. The pattern interrupt from email one makes engagement on this one stronger. Step three, add a follow me here email that pushes subscribers to a secondary channel. Step four, build a subscriber survey for email four.
Ask them three to five questions, including who else do you follow on this topic. Step five, add a referral request for email five and an even sharper incentivized one for email seven. This captures peak engagement, and the later one captures the most committed subscribers. Add an honest unsubscribe prompt for email six.
Make it sincere. The people who stay are worth more than the ones who would have ghosted you later. Tools for this, your email service provider so that you can set up these email sequences. mxtoolbox.com is a great place to confirm that you have SPF, DKIM, and DMARC set up, which are some technical ways to say that you need to get those set up before even [00:07:00] trying to do this because that is going to have a bigger impact.
GlockApps or InboxMonster are tools where you can see if your emails are actually landing in inboxes. And Tally or Typeform for the subscriber survey. The first week of a subscription is the strongest signal you'll ever have to an inbox provider that your relationship with a new reader is strong. A polite welcome email kind of wastes that window, whereas a seven email sequence built around replies, surveys, and asking for unsubscribes is how you build a list that's engaging a year down the road.
You can follow Tyler over on LinkedIn or learn about hypermedia marketing at hypermediamarketing.net and I'll see you tomorrow.
