Crafting effective emails is more than just writing catchy subject lines. There’s an entire technical side to it, where you need to be aware of all the not-so-fun details and know how to manage your email lists.
That’s where Prowly’s email assistance comes into play—whenever you’re ready to start sending emails, it will guide you through the process by providing you with intelligent tips on what you should alter, and what you’re doing well in terms of send-outs.
This guide will walk you through best practices on how to enhance your email deliverability, which in turn will help you foster stronger relationships with journalists:
Writing the email
#1 Keep the text-to-images ratio correct
I’m sure you can recall opening an email and getting huge images with words like “sale!” “50% off!”. But as you scroll down, you realize there’s barely a sentence or two of actual text. That, my friend, is a poorly balanced text-to-image ratio in emails and can land your email straight in the spam folder.
Emails are like conversations and need to be balanced. There’s a visual aspect and a textual one. To engage the recipient it’s important to not overdo images.
The standard recommendation is something called the 60/40 rule, which means your email should consist of 60% text and 40% images. When writing emails using Prowly, we’ll detect it for you automatically—no need to try and figure it out yourself.
#2 Avoid spam trigger words
While these change from time to time, you should avoid spam trigger words altogether.
The list is quite long, so Prowly helps you automatically conclude which words can be alarming and decrease your deliverability.
Think of words such as “additional income”, “please read”, “confidential”, “important information”, “guaranteed” and so on. While popular spam trigger words like “free gift” or “100% free” are more obvious, spam filters are getting more sophisticated, including more common words as well.
#3 Remove too many attachments
Want to make journalists aware of an amazing, one-of-a-kind conference? You can’t send them the estimated attendees in one attachment, a pamphlet in another, and an entire presentation about it. It’s too much, considering it takes them a few seconds to determine if they’re interested or not.
Next time you send an email, think of your recipient.
Will they click through it all? Is there information you can compile in one attachment? Is there a way to remove the attachment altogether and maybe embed it in the body of the email? Every little detail counts!
⛔️ And last but not least, coming from a technical standpoint, each attachment has a “weight”. The “heavier” the email, the more likely it will go to spam.
To avoid this, Prowly implements advanced mechanisms that will protect you from “weighty” attachments by turning them into links.
Choosing recipients
#4 Select the right number of recipients
You probably already know this, but it’s always worth re-stating—public relations emails are not marketing emails, and spamming recipients isn’t the way to go.
That’s why at Prowly, you’ll get a notification asking you to consider selecting fewer recipients if you go over 3000.
We don’t recommend this approach regardless, because personalizing your message is the best way to form long-lasting relationships with journalists you want to target.
Your best bet is to curate a targeted list of people you want to contact and send emails accordingly. Keep in mind that sending emails to too many people is counterproductive when it comes to reputation. Each person who doesn’t react to your email can lower your deliverability.
#5 Exclude risky contacts
Such contacts have email addresses with either low deliverability, or they’re low quality. While they might exist, they’re currently having technical issues that cause low engagement in their inboxes.
⛔️ They may further cause quality issues for your PR campaigns, since not excluding risky contacts can damage your reputation and affect deliverability in the future.
For example, if someone has sent an email to a contact from Prowly’s Media Database in the past seven days, and that email was hard bounced, we’re automatically qualifying it as a risky contact.
#6 Exclude blacklisted contacts
Although you can add, remove, or add a tag to blacklisted contacts, Prowly excludes blacklisted contacts from your email list automatically. We do this to protect your reputation as a sender since they must have been marked as harmful or reported to you as spam before.
#7 Re-think recipients with low open rates
If you’re sending emails to certain people over and over again, and they’re not even opening them up, you can always think of more engaging subject lines or simply use the Media Database to find other contacts that are more likely to be interested in your message.
In addition, persistently emailing them can also harm your sender reputation, leading to lower deliverability rates as email providers might flag your messages as spam.
#8 Avoid contacts with low click rates
If you’ve continuously sent emails to contacts who don’t open your messages, chances are they’re disengaged enough that you won’t get a successful response from them.
⛔️ Plus, if you think about it in an alternative way, they’re harming your overall PR metrics for those campaigns. Then, it becomes difficult for you to show progress and success when numbers are dragged down by recipients who aren’t interested.
#9 Exclude contacts with low-quality scoring
Similarly to risky contacts, these are said to be invalid or generally incorrect.
For example, they might have expired domains, be “one-time” emails, their DNS records are wrong, or have non-reputable email addresses.
A lot of people might see it as just another technicality, but sending emails to contacts with low-quality scoring can have a significant negative impact on your email reputation. And once that’s tarnished, it will be difficult to pick it back up.
#10 Exclude contacts with hard bounces
A hard bounce signals a permanent issue that prevents email delivery to that particular recipient. Typically, email addresses that hard bounce happen because the email address doesn’t exist, or the contact’s email server has permanently blocked delivery.
As opposed to soft bounces (which aren’t THAT bad), hard bounces can be quite dangerous to your deliverability as a sender. Usually, spam filters view these as signals that there’s something wrong and ruin your email reputation.
#11 And review those who soft-bounced in the past
Soft bounces are not as bad as hard bounces, but they can still harm your reputation.
Check how many times an email has bounced, and consider cleaning them out from your mailing list. The key is to keep a healthy, up-to-date list.
Some of the most common reasons email addresses may soft bounce include:
👉🏼 the recipient's mailbox being full,
👉🏼 incorrect mailbox configuration,
👉🏼 the server being down,
👉🏼 the message being too large,
👉🏼 temporary issues with the domain name,
👉🏼 failing DMARC,
👉🏼 spam filters, and so on.
#12 Make sure they’re GDPR compliant
It’s important to make sure whether or not your recipients are GDPR compliant. Well, what does that mean in simple words? An email address, just like a phone number or your physical address is personal, private data. We’re not allowed to use it in any way without specific consent from the owner.
✅ However, if the email address is public, then that’s fine.
⛔️ If it isn’t, we need the owner’s consent to email them.
Otherwise, if we contact them, and the user reports it as spam or explicitly doesn’t consent, it can do an immense amount of damage to our sender's reputation.
Sending the email
#13 Is your subject line the right length?
Too short, and you’ll lose out on conveying the right message. Too long, and the reader might not see the whole thing in their inbox.
What’s the perfect subject line length then?
The general rule is to keep the subject line text within 30 to 50 characters, or 4 to 7 words.
While it’s important to make the message stand out by using the right hooks, you also should try to explain the content of your message as easily as you can using the subject line. Just in case you need a brainstorming buddy, Prowly’s AI will help you draft engaging, compelling subject lines based on the content of your message.
#14 Have you included preview text?
Ignoring preview text in emails? Not the greatest idea. Think of it this way–it’s valuable real estate space. It can boost your email’s open rates significantly by engaging recipients and catching their eye. Without it, journalists will only see a default snippet from your message’s start, which isn’t really giving them a lot of detail.
Crafting your preview text lets you control the message, aligning it with your tone and purpose. That’s how you can further entice your audience and draw journalists to click on your email. In case you’re in a creative block and can’t come up with something interesting, you can use Prowly to generate it with AI.
#15 Is your sender's email address verified?
Verifying your sender's email address makes sure your emails are seen as real, helping them avoid the spam folder. It also stops others from using your email address without permission and builds trust with your readers by keeping unwanted emails away.
Doing so will help you maintain optimal email delivery rates, and protect your reputation as a sender. Think of it as a way to verify your identity, so that no one else can be pretending to be you (or your email address, in this case).
#16 Is your domain authenticated?
So many technicalities, that it can get overwhelming—we get it. However, domain authentication is one of the most critical steps in sending successful pitches.
In simple words, it involves verifying your domain to prove that your emails are genuinely from you. It helps to protect against phishing attacks and spoofing, ensuring that your emails reach your chosen recipients without being marked as spam.
Starting in February 2024, all of Prowly’s users are required to authenticate their domains in order to send emails from the platform. This requirement stems from Google’s and Yahoo’s policy changes, which had a great impact on sending emails in general.
#17 Have you personalized your email?
Personalizing an email is crucial for effective communication and engagement. By tailoring content to the recipient's interests, preferences, and past interactions, you foster a stronger connection and increase the likelihood of your message being read and acted upon.
Specific personalization features at Prowly enhance the recipient's experience by making the email relevant and meaningful, which can lead to higher open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. Plus, it demonstrates that you value the recipient as an individual, not just another contact in your database.
Implementing elements such as using the recipient's name and referencing specific details, can significantly boost the effectiveness of your email campaigns.
Last thing! Remember about maintaining your email lists
In order to get high engagement rates for your campaigns and reduce bounce rates, it’s important to maintain a clean email list.
What does that mean? Basically, it’s a routine task, where you periodically remove inactive subscribes, verify email addresses and simply check how “healthy” your recipients are in terms of their email addresses. At Prowly, it’s super easy to do this - just go to Contacts and click on the Email engagement filter.
“Regularly clean email lists by removing inactive or bouncing email addresses. High bounce rates and sending to dead mailboxes can negatively impact the sender's reputation, lowering future chances of landing in the “primary” inbox instead of the spam, promotional, or social tabs. The lower the reputation, the more likely the message will bounce.
Michał Borowiecki, Support Engineer at Prowly
The biggest impact on reputation is caused by:
👉🏼 Contacts who don’t open your emails;
👉🏼 Sending emails to contacts that bounce (especially non-existent mailboxes);
👉🏼 Sending emails to spam traps (email addresses that were deserted and are now used by email services to hunt spammers).”
Don’t forget that by consistently updating your list and managing it with due diligence, you can better target your audience and improve your chances of achieving satisfying results in your PR campaigns.
