At my last job I was tasked with launching a newsletter, and was suddenly faced with a bunch of unfamiliar acronyms: DKIM, DMARC, SPF. (Apparently that last one is not related to sun protection?)
So I texted Al Iverson (not the basketball player), who’s been working in email deliverability since the dawn of mainstream internet, and asked if he could help me figure out what I really needed to know.
Since you (probably) don’t have Al Iverson’s phone number, I chatted with him about email deliverability, owned audience, and windmills.
Claim to fame: Al’s been working in email deliverability since before the term even existed, including a 15-year stint at Salesforce as its director of deliverability.
Fun fact: He programmed all the computers in his high school’s Mac lab to play “Stayin’ Alive” for alerts instead of beeping. Old-school Macs couldn’t multitask while beeping; you had to listen to the entire 4-minute song.
“Free!” and “Buy now!” are probably okay in subject lines, Iverson tells me, but sometimes an email provider will block something as seemingly random and innocuous as the word “windmill.” And it’s anybody’s guess as to why.
Even more counterintuitively, Iverson says that using a swear word in a subject line isn’t necessarily a guaranteed trip to the spam filter anymore.
The real lesson here isn’t about some quixotic pursuit of The Ideal Email, it’s that there are persistent myths in email deliverability — and it pays for you to get acquainted with them.
For starters, Iverson suggests a healthy skepticism of any “top 200 words to avoid in your subject line” lists. And Gmail “wants to make sure that the subject line and sender information actually connect to what's in the body of the email,” so it’s “actually very sensitive” to outdated ideas like starting a bulk email with “Re:.”
In other words: Pay as much attention to the technical side of audience engagement as you do to creating excellent content.
“Why do people love email so much?” Iverson asks. “Because it is a platform that is open to all.” Platforms like Instagram and TikTok — aside from needing some basic video editing and possibly dance skills — are owned by corporate entities out of your control. Although individual email platforms like Gmail have a lot of influence when it comes to deliverability, your email audience is your own.
And, says Iverson, email “gives us this channel to connect with people without being beholden to these specific platforms.” The flip side of that is that “if you don't have the technical ability to take control of those levers that put it more into your control, you can still get similarly stuck.”
If you’re new to email newsletters, any one of the major platforms is a great place to start. But the more technical know-how you have (or can hire), the more you can do things like sending from your own domain, putting you just a little bit more “in control of your own destiny, both from a deliverability perspective and from a long-term branding and marketing perspective.”