The email marketers periodic table of elements

Ever heard of the periodic table? Whether you’re a science buff or not, at some point during your life you would have heard someone mention that there is a periodic table of elements which serves as a useful reference tool to arrange elements in accordance with their atomic mass. We’re by no means any kind of science buffs here at Mail Blaze but we did happen to stumble across MarTech’s email marketing periodic table and boy is it a great reference tool.

In this article, we’re going to take an in-depth look at this amazing email marketing reference guide and share some of the “science” and wisdom behind it.

Much like the periodic table of elements that you might know, Martech’s email marketing periodic table arranges email elements into categories that help you understand how certain email elements work towards helping you improve specific parts of your email campaigns.

Overall the table is grouped according to the following categories:

• Optimisation
• Deliverability
• Optimisation Toxins
• Deliverability Toxins
• Deliverability Traps

The grouping makes 100% sense as it aims to show you the relationship between certain factors that show you just how complex the email ecosystem can be. If you find it overwhelming - don’t worry, you’re probably not alone. We’re here to take some of the technicality out of it and explain it in a way that will make it easy for you to understand.

Let’s start with optimisation…

Email Optimisation is a crucial part of ensuring you are continually improving your email marketing efforts. It’s essentially the improvements that you make to your email campaigns to ensure ongoing growth and can take many different forms.

Within the optimisation category there are three further distinctions made for elements that contribute to the overall optimisation of your email marketing campaigns:

• Experimental elements
• Audience elements
• Content elements

Experimental elements

Experimental elements are related to technological advances within the email-and-development space

Here’s an overview of the experimental elements and a brief description of what they are:

These elements represent future advancements that are already in place or already used, but not by the widespread majority of email marketers.

Audience elements

Audience elements within the optimisation category of the email marketing periodic table are all related to your subscribers and elements in your campaigns that affect your subscribers.

Let’s take a closer look at these elements and what they are:

Content elements

Content elements within the optimisation category of the email marketing periodic table are all related to the actual content within your email campaigns.

Let’s take a closer look at these elements and what they are:

We’ve now covered all the elements within the email periodic table that relates to how you can optimise your campaigns. It’s really important that you review each element in a structured way to ensure that you are continually enhancing your email campaigns. This will ensure that you are always working towards achieving better results in all the campaigns you send out within the email channel.

Toxins that affect your email optimisation

Did you know there are email campaign elements that can negatively impact your email campaign optimisations? Three main toxins are identified by Martech within this space namely: Image Heavy, no-reply and URL shorteners.

Image heavy (Ih)

There’s a saying that sometimes less is more and when it comes to images within email campaigns this is true too. When you add too many images you can damage your email campaign performance dramatically. Some email clients block image heavy emails and having too many images can also affect how long it takes for images to load within your campaign. Most subscribers will not wait for images to load which means you are more likely to miss out on them engaging with your email as they’d rather just move on. Try and stick to a 60:40 ratio when it comes to your text vs image ratio.

No-reply (Nr)

If you are sending campaigns and use a no-reply email address as your reply-to address it can have a negative impact on your campaign. Email is all about creating opportunities for your subscribers to connect with you. If you use a no-reply email address or an email address that doesn’t actually exist, you could be missing out on valuable interactions and alienate your subscribers by being impersonal.

URL Shorteners (S)

Email clients do not like URL shorteners as they are often used for phishing scams. Phishing is a type of scam whereby a fake message is designed and sent with the intent to get the target to reveal sensitive information to the scammer or for them to deploy malicious software on your network.

Let’s talk about email deliverability…

Next up we’ll take a closer look at elements in the email periodic table that relate to deliverability.

This category is made up of compliance, infrastructure and trust elements.

We’ll run through all the compliance elements as they relate to deliverability first, please note that some of these elements are focused on the American market due to the periodic table that was developed by Martech.

Compliance elements that relate to deliverability

Infrastructure elements that relate to deliverability

Don’t be alarmed if any of these elements seem a bit “techie” - in most cases you’ll never need to worry about these infrastructure elements as our platform takes care of that for you. Where we might need your input or adjustments from your end, we will always be sure to send over clear instructions.

Trust elements that relate to deliverability

There are two trust elements that affect your email deliverability in your campaigns, namely safelists and Sender Reputation.

Safelists (Si)

A safelist is basically a list where you’ve become a user-approved sender. In most cases, a subscriber is added to a safelist if they add you to their contact list. When a subscriber does this, your emails won’t land in their spam folder.

Sender Reputation (Sr)

Sender reputation is the measure email clients use to determine where they will place your email in your subscriber’s inbox.

Toxins that affect your email deliverability

There are 4 email deliverability toxins namely:

• Complaints
• Hard Bounce
• Purchased Lists
• Soft Bounce

Complaints (Cm)

It’s a bad thing when your recipient marks your emails as spam. No one wants that and it can affect your deliverability going forward.

Hard Bounce (Hb)

A hard bounce is usually due to invalid email addresses on your list. These are really toxic for your email campaign performance. A hard bounce indicates that there is a permanent delivery failure to a subscriber. A hard bounce should be removed from your email list.

Purchased Lists (Pl)

Purchasing lists is always a bad idea, so bad in fact that Mail Blaze does not allow clients with purchased lists to use our platform. Purchased lists and rented lists are lists where you didn’t get permission from a subscriber on the list to communicate to them.

Soft Bounce (Sb)

Soft bounces are a less permanent form of emails not being delivered. Soft bounces can be related to full email inboxes or even happen when vacation autoresponders get sent back.

Deliverability traps exist…

Block List (Bl)

A block list is a list of unreputable, untrustworthy senders. (It’s a list we unfortunately have to keep).

Corporate Filters (Cf)

Corporate companies usually add filters to their corporate servers to protect themselves from scammers that can wreak havoc on their servers. These filters can affect your well-intended campaigns.

Desktop filters (Df)

Subscribers have a lot of options with regards to how they receive emails. Recipients are able to filter the emails they receive in their own accounts. To prevent them from automatically adding you to a folder where your emails won’t be read you need to ensure you stay relevant.

Gray Spam traps (Gt)

Gray Spam traps are spam traps that Email Service Providers use that contain recycled email addresses that flag spammers. Essentially it means that these addresses were active addresses at one point and then became inactive. If you want to avoid gray spam traps you’ll want to only email subscribers that have signed up with you in the last 6-12 months or have recently engaged with your email campaigns.

Pristine traps (Pt)

Pristine traps are traps that flag you as a spammer with real email addresses. You essentially might fall into this trap if you know that you did not get the email addresses on your list organically.

Spam filters (Sf)

A spam filter is a program that detects when unsolicited emails are sent (and they’re pretty hard to fool).

Typo traps (Tt)

This is a more common trap than you think, a typo trap is a spam trap that accounts for spammers who purposely use misspelled domain names to send.

Let us know what you think about the email marketer’s periodic table in the comments below.