Issue #260 All About Email

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #260 of All About Email!

Last week I took a look at email warm-up and a new blocklist from Validity called Heatwave.

This week (and next week), my buddy Lauren Meyer joins me for a two-part guest special called: “Five Skills That Separate Good Email Practitioners from Great Ones“.

Let’s go! 👇

💡 Over the next two issues, my guest author Lauren explores five non-technical skills that help email practitioners make better decisions.

This week, we start with:

Someone recently asked me what the most important skill is for becoming really good at email deliverability.

My mind raced through a flurry of topics:

💡 All important. All things I’d absolutely recommend learning.

But after cycling through the usual technical suspects, where I landed wasn’t actually technical... not technically.

Because while technical knowledge matters a lot if you wanna work in deliverability (in anything email, really), it’s not everything.

Don’t get me wrong, if you wanna code emails, you’re gonna have to learn to code; no way around that. If you wanna build a lifecycle strategy, you’d better understand your customer journey. Obv.

🧠 But after nearly twenty years in email, I’ve noticed that the people I trust most when things get weird tend to share another set of skills.

Because the reality is, email is a sweaty mess, even on its best day.

🚨 Your job is making good decisions anyway.

So, here are a few non-technical skills I think anyone who wants to get really good at email should develop…

This isn’t “always be learning,” although that’s a great thing to do, given how quickly our industry evolves.

🚨 The type of curiosity I mean is noticing when something doesn’t fit:

✋ This is where it’s really tempting to move on.

Honestly... I still catch myself doing it sometimes.

Why? Because marketers are effin’ busy! There’s always more we could be doing. Should be doing? Want to be doing? 😰

But also, because email problems are more like aquarium fish than dogs.

Dogs’ll let you know immediately when something’s wrong.

Fish, on the other hand… fish disappear behind a rock when there’s a problem, and by the time you notice, it’s days later, and they’re swimmin’ sideways (or upside down 😬).

🫧 (a.k.a. get out of the email bubble)

Many of us know what it’s like to live inside a silo and not really get much exposure to the rest of the business. Despite that fun little quirk of corporate culture, the very real truth we need to keep in mind constantly is that email doesn’t happen inside a vacuum.

👈 Sometimes you need to look sideways:

🚨 Also consider what’s happening outside your company, with mailbox providers, security vendors, spam filters, regulations, changes in the broader ecosystem, and actual human beings doing whatever they feel like that day.

And sometimes you need to look up:

I was recently talking with someone who was frustrated that her email list wasn’t growing:

🤔 Sounds like an email-growth problem, right?

Except she’s hosting that event in 2.5 months, with a goal of selling 300 tickets and securing 30 sponsors.

Twenty minutes into our conversation, it became clear that growing her newsletter from 80 to 1,000 subscribers wasn’t the fire we needed to put out.

💡 Selling tickets was.

And better yet, getting more people to the event would naturally create opportunities to grow her email audience anyway.

✅ That’s perspective.

The email metric was still relevant. It just wasn’t the most important thing for the business right now.

The better you get at looking sideways and upward, the less likely you are to spend three weeks optimising something that probably shouldn’t have been your priority in the first place.

Human behaviour repeats. Acquisition mistakes definitely repeat. Infrastructure problems leave familiar fingerprints. Even executive panic follows recognisable patterns.

The tricky part is that they don’t always present themselves in exactly the same way.

✅ Sometimes the problem is obvious.

Performance falls off a cliff, customers start complaining, conversions drop, and every signal on your dashboard is flashing red. Red. RED!

Other times, it’s just a blip.

One metric or mailbox provider behaves slightly differently than the normal trend. Complaints tick up in one segment. Something just feels a little... off.

🧠 Over time, you start to recognise little warning signs and think, “Haven’t I seen this movie before?”

And that matters because:

It helps you recognise that:

💡 The earlier you recognise a meaningful pattern, the more options you usually have for dealing with it before it becomes a much bigger problem.

That’s good for your email program, good for the people trusting you to make the call... and pretty great for your blood pressure, too.

Think about one email metric or problem that’s been bothering you lately. Before changing anything, try these three questions:

💡 You don’t need a definitive answer to every question. The point is to give yourself a better starting point for deciding what to do next.

Next week: Recognising what might be happening is only part of the job. We’ll look at the final two skills:

What did you learn this week? Test your knowledge. 👇

The quiz will open in a new window when you choose the first answer.

Have fun! 🤩

Every week, as I write this newsletter, I’ll share the track of the moment to create an unbelievably eclectic playlist just for your inbox.

🚨 If you’re interested in sponsoring the “All About Email” newsletter, you can find all the details in this Google Doc.

This week's excellent and insightful email news & tips:

If you have any questions about this email or email marketing, please reply, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

I hope you have a great week! 👋