The customer

Dr. Linnea Passaler is the founder of Heal Your Nervous System (HYNS). The world’s first science-based program supports persons with highly sensitive nervous systems.

The HYNS program includes online and video content, exclusive support groups, and hands-on regulation sessions. It’s been called “life-changing” by many people who’ve used it.

As a highly sensitive person, Dr. Linnea understands the challenges faced by those with a sensitive nervous system and created HYNS with them in mind.

The challenge

Dr. Linnea was frustrated with her email marketing strategy. She built a growing opted-in list of thousands of people interested in mental health topics. 

After running an email marketing campaign between March and April 2022, she saw her open rates decrease to less than 10%.

She tried to figure out why, but she couldn’t. Her emails were well-written, informative, and helpful. But she didn’t know how to get people to read her emails and turn them into paying members.

HYNS’ tech team ran a series of deliverability tests but struggled to diagnose and solve the issue. Dr. Linnea wasn’t seeing the results she wanted.

She tried everything she could, but the results were underwhelming. She knew there had to be a better way.

The journey

When Dr. Linnea realized that the open rates were so bad, she looked at fixing any potential problems with her internal development team, but although this helped, it wasn’t enough to get her open rates where she wanted. So she started asking around who could be a trusted professional to help her, but the research turned out to be really hard. There didn’t seem to be many people that seemed reliable or had a track record that she felt comfortable with.

The discovery

Finally, Dr. Linnea found Fabrício through an online service (Upwork). He had so many amazing reviews that it was clear he had provided great results to other people. They exchanged a few messages and Dr. Linnea soon realized that Fabrício not only knew what he was talking about, he had very high ethical standards, which was really important to her.

The solution

Dr. Linnea turned to Hand-Delivered.email for help.

Fabrício Y. Fujikawa, an email deliverability specialist with +30 years of experience in the IT industry, gave her practical and quickly applicable instructions on implementing an Email Deliverability Machine.

In a few months, she saw dramatic improvements in her email campaigns. 

What did the Email Deliverability Machine consist of?

• Inbox placement rate management
• Subscribers segmentation based on their behavior
• A/B testing for optimization
• InboxAlly for email deliverability recovery
• Overall deliverability monitoring system

Let’s look at these topics in detail to better understand how they work and how you can use them in your projects.

Inbox placement rate management

The first step was to run an inbox placement test — this would determine the healthy deliverability of emails at that moment. Fabrício wanted to see what percentage of emails would be delivered directly into a user’s primary inbox and if they’d land in the promotions tab, categories, or junk folders.

Subscribers segmentation based on their behavior

You can implement a basic segmentation in every email marketing list:

• highly-engaged subscribers
• other subscribers

After segmenting your list, it’s best to send campaigns first to the engaged subscribers. After at least one hour, you can send the same message to the other subscribers. The more you can wait, the better.

Engaging the first segment will signal to their Email Service Providers (ESPs) that your content is interesting and valuable. This will favor the deliverability of the second segment.

Over time, this practice will improve your overall email deliverability.

A/B testing for optimization

A/B testing compares two versions of an email campaign to determine which version performs better: you create two versions of one email campaign and send them to small groups of recipients.

Most marketers choose a percentage between 1% and 20% based on the size of their list to run a/b tests.

You then compare each variation’s results and decide which has performed best in hitting your goals.

InboxAlly for email deliverability recovery

InboxAlly is an automated tool that teaches email providers — like Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo — to consider your messages important and put them in the inbox — not the spam folder.

This significantly boosts engagement rates, which translates into increased profits for you.

Overall deliverability monitoring system

Email deliverability comprises several components: analyze content, manage sender reputation, test inbox placement and email previews — and SendForensics was the tool for monitoring these.

The implementation

Inbox placement rate management

GlockApps was the tool selected for this task. These were the results:

• 49.2% of the messages were delivered to the primary inbox
• 26.2% reached the spam (junk) folder
• 23.1% ended in the promotions tab (categories)
• 1.5% weren’t delivered at all

The email deliverability had problems. 

Monitoring inbox placement rates periodically is crucial whenever you find yourself in a situation like this. So, Fabrício implemented a periodic monitoring routine.

Over time, the inbox placement increased from 73% to +91%:

Subscribers segmentation based on their behavior

Dr. Linnea used the automation and segmentation capabilities in ActiveCampaign to segment her mailing list.

A two-part engagement tagging automation was used to tag subscribers based on their engagement behavior.

She then created two segments from her list: a segment of highly engaged subscribers and another of everyone else. As of October 25, 2022:

• Highly Engaged = 17%
• Others = 83%

A/B testing for optimization

In ActiveCampaign, Dr. Linnea A/B tested the subject lines for her email campaigns using 20% of her list.

InboxAlly for email deliverability recovery

ActiveCampaign was used to create an automation that sends daily messages to the seed emails of InboxAlly.

The message used was identical to the first email new subscribers receive when they sign up, thus increasing the chances of getting all messages delivered.

The seed emails were split in half and assigned to Gmail and Yahoo email accounts based on the domains of subscribers and the options provided by InboxAlly at that time.

The email inbox placement improved over time to +90%.

They increased the number of emails sent by 10x during the launch period. To preserve their deliverability and ensure that more customers received their emails, they increased the seed email accounts to 500. 

They also switched the seed emails distribution to become more similar to their subscribers’ distribution:

• Gmail 70%
• Yahoo 10%
• Hotmail 10%
• Outlook 10%

Overall deliverability monitoring system

SendForensics‘ unique email address was included in the daily monitoring automation and the regular list of subscribers.

Monitoring occurred at regular intervals, and whenever an email campaign was delivered to subscribers, they could get a quick view of the deliverability.

The results

Dr. Linnea started a new membership program in September 2022.

During 10 days, she sent more than 200,000 emails and saw enrollment numbers 216% higher than the previous launch.

Using the Email Deliverability Machine for 5 months, they have seen their open rates vary from 39% to 84%. The subscribers’ list size increased by 139%.

They plan to launch a re-engagement campaign automation that will be in place by the next membership program.

“Before starting to work with Fabricio, I felt at loss. I had spent so much time and effort in building my list to a number I was very proud of, and now I wasn’t able to communicate with my community. Everything is so obscure in this industry, that it felt impossible for the regular entrepreneur who’s not a professional email guru to crack the code of open rates.

Now, after seeing that those open rates actually CAN improve tremendously, I feel confident that building my list is the best way to grow my business, and that I can actually rely on the list to remain an asset over time, provided we keep working on it.

I cannot emphasize enough how this has impacted my confidence in building a successful business over the next few years.

I now feel confident investing in every marketing effort to grow my list because I can then reach my audience, nurture it and sell to it.”
~ Dr. Linnea Passaler, Founder & CEO @ Heal Your Nervous System | Linkedin

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