Pepipost – your secret email superhero!

An email delivery tool that is the best-kept secret

That secret is kept a little too much, in our opinion, and MailBakery’s coding works brilliantly with this tool, so we thought a shout-out is worthwhile to share!

Pepipost is an email delivery service that works with either API or SMTP. Pepipost can send triggered emails to a list of subscribers or transactional emails, which are event-based or behavior-based (confirmations, receipts, invoices). They can also handle auto-responding to inquiries for lead nurturing in longer sales cycles.

Pepipost is made by developers for developers, and always in a state of growth. One of their latest integrations is artificial intelligence to ensure inbox delivery. Pepipost has (and evangelizes) a philosophy of keeping the email ecosystem clean. They do this by encouraging good sender practices.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) optimizing delivery efficiency

As a large email distributor, efficiency is what keeps your emails sending and arriving without any hiccups or delays. To ensure our efficiency as our data continues to grow, we introduced Pipe: a multi-objective resource allocation system. Pipe observes minute shifts of email delivery and adjusts the delivery throughput based on what it learns.

• Delivery optimization (DO): DO breaks down your marketing campaign into several sub-campaigns internally, then structures and delivers them to maximize inbox delivery.
• Dynamic WARM-UP system: This helps to build the reputation of new emailers. Pipe looks and learns from the parameters of prior emails, analyzing the number of emails delivered, bounce rate, open rate, click rate, and complaints. Pipe uses what it learns and arrives at the number of emails to send as your reputation builds.
• KILL SPAMMER:  With the thousands of daily signups coming through Pepipost, a significant number of those signups are spammers, which can hurt the reputation of the sender community. KILL SPAMMER can identify good senders from bad ones and take action automatically.

Tips to being a good steward

Your emailing practices should not be a “send it and forget it” activity. Anything worth doing is worth putting some vigor into it!  Not only that, you have an online reputation to live up to. If too many of your emails find their way to spam folders, then many more will follow automatically. If your email never reaches the recipient, then all of your blood, sweat, and tears spent disappears in vain.

Contact management

Keep your contact list up to date by way of accuracy and activity. First of all, keep your contact list tidy by removing any bounced email addresses promptly to avoid repeating (and more charges).

Make sure your contact list contains recipients that want to be there. I’m talking about contacts that gave their email with a genuine interest in receiving future communications. Forcing them to provide an email or using an email address for anything other than the original intention only leads to eventual unsubscribing or worse yet, spam reports. Raise your hand if you ever begrudgingly gave your email address to get through a form, only to unsubscribe shortly after that because you were bombarded with emails. I thought so!

Another tip when people sign up for your email list is to set up your system to send a confirmation. This gives the recipient a chance to unsubscribe right away and decreases the chances of your email getting into spam folders.

Avoid the temptation to purchase email lists. Outdated emails are an easy prediction. You could spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on a list filled with bogus email addresses, spam traps, and typos. Expect a very high bounce rate from these lists. You will soon learn the ROI isn’t worth it.

Validate emails as they are received. Email validation verifies if an email is deliverable and valid. A couple of free tools worth mentioning that validate email addresses are ValidateEmailAddress and  EmailValidator . Look around, though. These aren’t the only ones out there.

Pay attention to reporting. If a recipient is repeatedly ignoring your emails and not bothering to open them, resist the urge to hold onto that valid email and remove them from the list. This will avoid any additional charges. Decide if that cutoff will be 3 emails, or 5 or 10. Develop a schedule to keep your contact list tidy.

Segment your contacts to make sure your emails speak directly to their interests. Imagine sending gardening emails to recipients that are most interested in NASCAR racing. I know it’s an extreme contrast, but you get the idea! Tailoring emails to these segmented recipients significantly increases the chances of them opening the email and reading the content. Some common examples of useful segmentation might be active customers, sales funnel, geographical area, business type, or common interests.

Getting the emails opened

Now that we have ensured that the emails are going to a valid inbox, how do we get them opened?

What’s that perfect time for your audience to receive an email? Run a couple of test emails to gauge the level of interaction when you send emails at different days and different times. For example, when it comes to business to business (B2B) emails, having a marketing email in their inbox first thing in the morning is likely to be ignored. Fridays are often the kick start of a three-day weekend, so emails arriving on Friday afternoon may wait until the next Tuesday. Also, consider the typical break schedule or time between meetings. Do you want to catch your readers at the perfect pause? If your emails are going to personal inboxes, when are they ready to sit down and explore your content?

Personalize messages to get your readers’ attention. If they provided their name already, take advantage of it, for it does get their attention. It may take a little longer, but a conversion at the end makes it all worthwhile.

Subject lines are the first chance to catch their attention. Make it fabulous, so they want to open and read more. With the use of cell phones, consider the reduced space that your readers will see. You have about 15-25 characters (that’s only 4-6 words) to catch their attention.

Don’t be too salesy. In fact, hide the sales pitch down below unless it’s a promotion they can’t refuse. Instead of turning your email into a straight-up ad, provide some useful content to enrich their lives or even their experience with your company or product.

MailBakery – made of sugar and spice

Because Pepipost is focused strictly on mail delivery, the coding behind building and formatting of emails is where we come in. MailBakery builds the code for templates and skins to create a customized professional impression to your customers. Our code integrates beautifully with companies like Pepipost and many others. From our Template store to a piece custom-designed for your brand, we guarantee you will love it! Tell us what you are thinking and get a quick quote today.