All my emails are going into my c...

[Gogo yubari]

Hi Piper,

Tom here, Candace’s husband as she is traveling at the moment. One of my day jobs is working at a marketing company that specializes in email delivery. Here’s what I can tell you:

– Delivery of email is all about volume, content and reputation. Volume is obviously not what is impeding your emails getting delivered if you’re just sending single messages to individuals one at a time. If you’re using good common sense then content probably is not either (don’t use all caps, too many emojis, use the word ‘free’ in the subject line etc…so basically don’t make yourself look like a spammer). So the likely culprit is reputation.

– Reputation can be looked at several ways, the reputation of the person (do the emails you send get reported as spam too often) and the reputation of the platform (does mail.com in aggregate send too many spam messages). I suspect your individual reputation is good unless you’ve sent a lot of spammy messages from your address in the past. (Repairing a bad email reputation btw, can take many, many months). Unfortunately it appears by a cursory glance at reviews online that mail.com as a platform has over the years developed a reputation for being a spammy kind of sender. I suspect it’s because of it’s basic level of service many spammers take advantage of it and ruin it for everyone else. It may be interesting to note…I searched our member database of over 5000 practitioners who have been with us at one time or another over the past 10 years, and only 4 people used mail.com and you are the only active practitioner that uses it.

– So what to do? There’s nothing you can do about a bad platform reputation except move probably…complaining to them will likely be a frustrating experience. I looked on mail.com’s website to see if you can institute secure delivery policies like SPF and DKIM and can not find any information. These are ‘tools’ that can be part of your email profile that tell the other email delivery algorithms at gmail, yahoo, hotmail etc (where your clients likely are) that you personally are a ‘good’ sender.

– There are many obvious reasons to switch off a platform that has a bad reputation and there are options if you don’t want to go with one of the big public platforms like gmail or yahoo. One of the easiest is to establish an email address from your website hosting provider (If you have a website) and the use a tool like outlook for your email platform. You will be building your reputation from scratch so use good policy. One of the advantages of the big public platforms is they use all the security tools and you will likely have little problems communicating with others on the same platform. Gmail messages tend to have easier deliver to other gmail addresses imo, because the sender and receiver are using the same technology.

Anyway, probably not what you wanted to hear but hopefully you have a little more insight into what’s causing the problem of your clients not receiving your messages.

Kind regards,

Tom

[Piper Cheyanne]

Hi Tom,

That’s brilliant information and thank you so much for all of that, I really appreciate it! It’s funny but just after I wrote the post, the thought entered my mind that it’s exactly what you believe it to be. I certainly haven’t been a spammer in any sense or done anything that would draw that type of conclusion with my emails. So like you, I feel it simply my crummy email provider! It means redoing my business cards and more, but having just one of the clients that I’m missing book a session, will certainly cover that. So thank you so very much for your feedback, I really appreciate it!

Best Wishes!
Piper

[Paul Peters]

A little thing I do with important emails is I send a text or a whatsapp to say I have emailed, just in case it went to spam.

[Piper Cheyanne]

@Paul_Peters Excellent idea Paul. Never hurts to have back up! ?Thanks so much for that.

All the best!
Piper

[Irina Nola]

You might want to read this book, as there is very similar information there, and get in touch with the author (She is in Israel, working with autistic kids) https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/11637589.Sigal_Alexandra_Porat

[Lilly Espiau]

At the very top of my profile, the first thing a client will see when they try to see my information is this in blue:

***Please note, you will receive a reply directly from my email address [email protected]. Make sure to check your SPAM/JUNK folder just in case***

As it is I hear back from 70%-90% of clients but They could very well be contacting more than one practitioners and go with whoever they feel have them best information, scheduled them sooner, or got back to them earlier, etc

[Piper Cheyanne]

Thank you for the information Lilly ? It’s always good to have more input! I think it was mainly my crummy email provider, as I haven’t
had the problem since I changed to another provider. Of course, just in case, as you’ve mentioned, I have put something on my page telling people to be sure to check their spam folders. Can’t hurt! ?

?????
Piper