So I got this new Gisou hair oil and decided to set up my email newsletter about it. Figured it’d be simple – big mistake. First I just grabbed some random email tool I found online. Signed up real quick, didn’t even bother checking the settings. Started typing my fancy welcome email about Moroccan hair rituals, hit send… and nothing happened. Total crickets.
The Absolute Dumb Shit I Did
Started digging around like why ain’t my emails going out. Turns out I hadn’t verified my damn domain! Had to go into my hosting account and mess with DNS records. Copied those TXT and CNAME thingies like five times cause I kept pasting them wrong. Took me like two hours just to get the domain verified properly.
Then I thought hey let’s import my subscriber list from Instagram. Grabbed my followers CSV, uploaded it without cleaning anything. Next day got slapped with spam complaints! My sending reputation tanked immediately. Had to manually remove all the dead emails and people who never signed up. Lesson learned: always double opt-in your subscribers.
The Testing Nightmare
Wanted to make sure my emails looked pretty on phones. Sent test emails to myself using four different accounts. Opened them on my iPhone, Android tablet, laptop, even asked my neighbor to check her Outlook. The formatting was completely jacked on Apple Mail – images overflowing, text overlapping. Had to rebuild the whole template from scratch using simple tables.
Pro tip: test every single email on multiple devices before blasting. I learned the hard way when my first campaign went out with broken layout to 800 people.
How I Fixed This Hot Mess
- Created separate lists for new subscribers vs existing customers
- Set up proper authentication (SPF, DKIM) to stop spam filters
- Made plain-text versions for every fancy email
- Added double opt-in confirmation steps
- Scheduled emails mid-morning instead of random times
Took me three weekends and countless coffee runs to finally get it right. Nearly rage-quit when my welcome email got flagged as spam for using “FREE” in subject line. Now my open rates are steady at 60%. Moral of the story? Email setup will humble you fast if you skip the boring setup steps.
