I’m starting from zero and want to learn email marketing properly, including copywriting, list building, design, automation, segmentation, deliverability, and analytics.
Which platform/course would you recommend for a beginner, and what learning path would you follow if you were starting today?

Trying to get a sense of what's actually live for people past the welcome sequence every ESP hands you as a default template. win-back, post-purchase, abandoned cart, some re-engagement flow, or something specific to your business that doesn't fit a normal category? also curious what you built and then killed because it didn't perform, half the time that's the more interesting story than what's still running.  

I had a list of 6,500 engaged substack subscribers and set up a Kit account to promote a webinar. We only had 3 signups for the webinar and in a test yesterday to 6 owned accounts (mix of gmail/outlook) everything went to spam. I know there’s interest for the subject material because we got more signups from other sources using far fewer leads. Here was my process:

* Started with a warmup process of sending a text-only email through Kit to about 100 of the most engaged subscribers, and then slowly working our way down over about 10 days through the list of 6.5k subscribers. The least-engaged group still had opened at least 1 substack newsletter in the past few months and the vast majority opened 5 or more in the last few months.

* After going through about 4.5k subscribers in the list with the text-only email, over the span of 2 weeks we sent out a 3-step sequence to the entire list (in segments) with a link to the webinar.

Judging by the number of signups, I’m thinking these messages were probably hitting spam very early on in the process. Obviously open and click rates don’t tell us anything.

I will add the caveat that of the 6.5k list, many of them didn’t explicitly opt-in to the substack newsletter, but as I said, all of them opened 1 or more newsletters in the past several months and didn’t unsubscribe so I would think this list didn’t have a high risk of everything going to spam.

What went wrong here and what should we do for the next webinar promotion?

Thank you

Transactional emails keep landing in spam even though the usual email authentication is set up correctly. I traced it to a shared ip with a poor reputation, has anyone fixed this by switching to a dedicated ip?