Email Testing

I run a small business. The very ideal of mom-&-pop shop. It makes ends meat, and that’s about it.

In the past 6 months I’ve decided to try to scale up, and the first thing I needed to do was to assess my process, organize, streamline and modernize. In so doing, I created a bunch of work for my self, (all useful) mainly by addressing deferred maintenance. I identified some tools that I can use when the scale is there, and began organizing and tracking information that was always left to my limbic system to track.

Through all this, modernizing the web site and getting all the webhosting, domain registration and email service under one roof seemed like a good idea. Seemed there where also some unintended consequences. #1 my SEO ranking dropped off the face of the earth. From a steady 300 hits a month to zero. And #2 I stopped receiving emails from clients. It turns out that they were not getting my emails… any of them! For some reason their systems decided that my email address was a spam account, and all my invoices and weekly updates where being filtered out.

In the process of preparing to scale I took my organic business from alive and putzing along, to a work laden corpse soaking up fees, time, and energy. UGH.

So today I’m drafting 3 emails, all with slightly different designs and wording to see what if anything I can do to slip past the spam filters, and sending them to clients that I have a good relationship with, as well as their phone number so that I can assess what is getting through. If anything.
Draft 1: No trigger words like “FREE” or “SALE” Simple text, no images.
Draft 2: Light trigger words like “Holiday” and an image.
Draft 3: Trigger words, and images.