Are Gmail Updates Going to Ruin Your TPT Email List?

Possibly.

Not if you’ve been doing things right all along. And I’ll be the first one to stand up and say, "Whoops! My bad. I skipped the first step.”

It’s the same feeling as when a student gets your test and the first problem feels impossible. (I'm done here. Turning it in blank instead of trying...)

But, unlike our students, I didn't give up. It only took me 15 minutes to complete step one. You can do that while the kids get a free pass to run wild upstairs. Or while they take a quiz if you’re in the classroom. (Not that I’d ever suggest taking precious time away from grading…)

It’s possible that many of us will see changes in February. And if you want these to be positive changes, make sure you’ve done these 3 things.

Authenticate Your Email

This is making sure it’s you…like really you… sending the emails. And not someone who’s pretending to be you. Which sounds great.

The only downside to this was that I wasn’t authenticated. Nuts.

I’m not techie and you CAN do this too. I have a Squarespace site and I don’t code anything or know anything about Wordpress.

It took me 5 minutes to read an article and 10 minutes to authenticate my account with Mailchimp. (Translation: copy and paste 4 pieces of text and paste into Squarespace.)

(And it would have taken 5 minutes if I didn't go back and reread everything 7 times while doing it.)

Whew! That 15 minutes of psychological torture is over. Now for the easy step you're already doing.

Enable Easy Unsubscription

Most of us are doing this too.

We don’t want people on our list who aren’t going to buy.

This isn’t Hotel California. They can and should leave. As quickly as they want to.

Of course we will always welcome them back.

See? That step is easy. But the next one is hard. And takes time. But it's my superpower and I'll help you.

Ensure You’re Sending Wanted Email

This means when someone unsubscribes, if too many people choose spam, then your spam rating will go up. Most of us send weekly, monthly, or at most 3 times a week emails so I don’t think that will impact us. 

But here’s the part that will impact you. (and you won’t find it on other blog posts.) I was researching here, and noticed a few red flags.

These are common TPTer practices will impact you at some point (even if you don't have 5K subscribers yet):

Increasing the sending volume too quickly can result in delivery problems.

I watched this last year.

During an email collaboration one of the collaboraters had thousands of Instagram followers. But no email list. As she got hundreds of subscribers, her freebie was going into their spam folders. For nearly every subscriber. It was super frustrating for everyone.

She went from 3 subscribers to 1500. At this point maybe she’s straightened that out, but I bet her deliverability is still low. Which means low click rate. Which means low sales. (What should you do? Collect emails in a giveaway and add them slowly over a month or two.)

Send email at a consistent rate.

Most of us try to be consistent, but here’s a great reason to be persistent (or buy email starters if you get in a time crunch. #shamelessplug) <<<That’s my freebie if you want to try one.

Start with a low sending volume to engaged users, and slowly increase the volume over time.

This is why you shouldn’t start an email list and then start doing collaborations to grow your list to 1K right away. First you need to learn how engage your users. And that’s a skill that needs at least a few months to learn. (And test for that matter!)

Clean your cold subscribers carefully

Cold subscribers are harder to track these days. Some subscribers may open all of your emails, but your email service provider can’t track the open. So before this update go and identify your cold subscribers, offer them a discount on a product. Then in the next day or two email them and let them know that you only want to keep sending your newsletter if they are enjoying it. Have them click on a link. After that series, then go ahead and clean them if they don’t click. That way you don’t accidentally clean engaged subscribers.

As a platform matures it gets harder and harder to sell on. We can look at Etsy and see how it has grown over the years. TPT is in the process of growing and we need to keep that in mind. 

First it was easy to sell on TPT, throw up a product and it would sell. Then you had to create covers and market the product. Now, there's a lot more involved.

Early on it was easy to sell through Pinterest, now we have to work at it.

The same thing is happening with email.

And while as marketers that’s a little disappointing. It’s good to get better. It’s going to make you more money to become an engaging email writer. (Something more than “I’ve been working so hard on this new product for you. I can't wait for you to try it out. It’s a game changer. Blech.”)

You run a powerful business. It’s time to start writing powerful emails. Google is giving us the chance to do that.