Decoding SMTP: The Internet’s Mail Carrier
SMTP is Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, which, as its name suggests, is pretty simple. Imagine SMTP to be the postman of the Internet. You don’t personally take a letter to your friend’s front door when you put it in the mail box. It is picked up by a postal operator, sorted, sorted and directed through the appropriate postal depots before being handed off to its destination. SMTP does the same thing as your email, but much faster – at light speed rather than the speed of a delivery truck.
When you press “send” on an e-mail, you aren’t instantly sending it across the galaxy to the recipient. It’s sending the message to an SMTP server that will then strictly adhere to a set of rules to route that message from server to server, finally to the proper inbox. If your email provider didn’t have this common rule book, your email provider and the recipient’s email provider wouldn’t have any common ground to communicate with each other. SMTP is that common language and it’s been in operation quietly since the dawn of email.
This is where it gets confusing for novices: SMTP is only responsible for the outbound trip. It’s the protocol that is used to send mail, not receive mail. Protocols such as IMAP and POP3 are used in reading your email box. With IMAP, you can view and organize your email in the same inbox, and view the same emails on your phone, laptop, and tablet. POP3, however, downloads the messages directly to one device, and will often delete them from the server after they are downloaded. In simple terms, SMTP serves to send mail and IMAP and POP3 serve to retrieve mail. It’s important to know this difference when you begin setting up a blog, a newsletter or a business email address, because you’ll have to specify both an outbound (SMTP) server and an inbound (IMAP or POP3) server. If you get it wrong, you’ll be unable to send any messages or unable to see the messages you receive.
How an Email Travels (The Basic Steps)
When you comprehend that SMTP is simply the outgoing portion of the journey, it is straightforward to follow the journey. Well, here’s what happens behind the scenes, every time you send an email and it’s all broken down into easy steps:
- You click “send” and your email program (Gmail, Outlook, Proton Mail or your newsletter program) crams your message, subject line and attachments into a little package.
- Your client logs on to your outgoing SMTP server that you typically get from your email host or email marketing platform.
- The two systems do a fast digital handshake, which is akin to saying hello, hello, this is a real connection, this is the person who’s sending and this is the person who’s getting.
- The SMTP server checks the domain of the recipient and sees where their mail server resides on the Internet.
- This message is passed from one server to another, a few times if necessary, to the recipient’s mail server.
- The receiving server accepts the message and places it in the recipient’s inbox where his or her IMAP or POP3 software does the rest and gets him to read it.
In most instances, no more than a second or two at each step, but each step must pass for your email to reach the recipient(s). That’s why deliverability can occur at any number of steps along the way, and that’s why it helps to understand the basics so you have a leg up on troubleshooting.
This is a thing a lot of beginners forget to take into account. Successfully mailing your e-mail is the actual half of the work. Now that you’ve spent hours creating the perfect newsletter, you’ve got a subject line that you know is going to get opened and your open rates are skyrocketing, only to have your reader click the link in your email only to find that your website only loads in 8 seconds, get cluttered, or doesn’t load on their phone. That is the old reader that’s gone. Everything you went through to set up your SMTP, all the careful sending, all your sending skills are wasted because you’re bounced from a slow landing page rather than a conversion.
That’s where the layout of your website is as important as your outgoing emails. Any beautifully delivered email is destroyed if it leads to a clunky website. This is what Piki Templates was created to fill. Among the most popular blogger templates, Piki Templates provides lightweight and SEO optimized blogger templates for bloggers that mainly inspire their audience via email.
Citron and
Mag Paper layouts are designed from the start to be quick to load and mobile responsive, so when someone clicks a link in your newsletter, they’ll end up on a page that loads practically immediately and maintains a clean design across all screen sizes. You don’t lose readers out of your site to a slow site, you maintain the momentum that your email just created, and that momentum becomes pageviews, subscribers and revenue.
In this chapter, you’ll learn the best practices for setting up a successful email marketing campaign.
Just like subject lines and send times, if you’re serious about building an audience via email, your website architecture should be given the same attention. Having a site that’s clean, well-built isn’t just nice to have, it’s what makes all your hard work at email cultivation pay off: in the form of loyal readers or paying customers. Why this is important and what is key to focus on:
Speed is non-negotiable. Themes such as
Monster from Piki Templates are developed as a very lightweight structure, eliminating all the extra fluff that would slow down a web page even on a substandard mobile connection.
Low maintenance = more content. You don’t need to patch plugins or fix failed layouts all the time, to write your next email marketing campaign with
Free blogger templates from Piki Templates.
An uncluttered design enhances the user experience. Anyone who lands on an organized and easy-to-follow page is much more apt to remain and read your content and click through to your subsequent post or offer.
The position of ads is important for monetisation. AdSense friendly designs position the ad units in places where your reader will see them, but not too much, which allows you to actually make money from the traffic your SMTP (email) campaigns produce.
A mobile-friendly approach safeguards your open-to-click pipeline. Because so many email opens occur on phones, a template that automatically adjusts to fit smaller screens doesn’t allow that traffic to simply bounce back.
Make the setup of your site the finish line for each email. If the landing experience fails to deliver the same, all that work and effort in deliverability proves to be pointless.
Sending and Succeeding with Confidence
The more you understand about SMTP the more control you’ll have over your communications. Whether you’re just about to start your first blog inbox, or you’re up to managing a full newsletter business, you aren’t going to treat email as a magical black box anymore, but you’ll see it as a logical, step-by-step system to trouble shoot and trust. However, well-sending is just the start of the tale. Add a website designed with a fast, clean and well structured template and you have both got a way of being noticed and also a way of keeping the reader once they have noticed you. When your sending is reliable and your landing is as quick as lightning, then that’s a recipe for genuine growth in your email traffic.
