Are your emails to your Young Living customers even getting seen? A few opens, hardly any replies, and the suspicion that your messages are landing in spam, or in the Promotions tab next to a shoe sale, is one of the worries Brand Partners bring to us most often at GetOiling. You’re asking exactly the right question. Most of what decides where an email lands is within your reach, and the one technical piece is something our team can set up for you.
Rather watch it done? Skip down to the video with Coach Ashley from the GetOiling team.
This post walks through why inboxes sort mail the way they do, and the settings and writing habits that put your emails back in front of the people who asked to hear from you. If you want help with your own account, bring it to the Weekly Work Session, our live group Q&A and help call every Thursday at 12pm ET. And if you aren’t on GetOiling yet (it’s the website, email and business system built for Young Living Brand Partners), you can start for $1 for your first month and set all of this up in your own account.
Why Are My Young Living Emails Going to Spam?
Every email you send passes through an inbox provider first: Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Apple Mail. Before your customer ever sees your message, that provider decides where it goes: the main inbox, the Promotions tab, or the spam folder. It makes that call from signals running in the background of every send: who the email says it’s from, whether that address can be verified, how the message is built, and how the people you send to have treated your mail in the past. Do they open it? Click it? Reply? Or ignore it and delete it?
How people treat your mail matters more than most of us realize. Inbox providers watch open rates, clicks and replies from the very first email you send to someone. When people engage, the provider learns that your mail is wanted, and your next email gets a better spot. When people ignore it, that history follows you, and future emails get pushed further from view. So the question isn’t only “is my email good?” It’s also “does everything about this email tell the inbox it came from someone this person wants to hear from?”
The good news is that the signals you control are simple ones. Where you send from. Whether you’re saved in your customer’s contacts. How your first sentence reads. How the email is formatted. And who you send it to. Each section below takes one of those in turn.
Why Your Young Living Email List Is Worth Protecting
Social media is a wonderful place to show up. You post, people like and comment and share, and that visibility is worth having. But the feed decides who sees your post, and the feed changes its mind constantly. Your email list is different. The people on your list said yes to hearing from you, and you can reach them whenever you choose, without asking an algorithm for permission. That’s why the long game for every Brand Partner is to invite people from social into a place you control, and your email list is that place.
Texts are great for a quick, timely nudge (our post on texting Young Living customers covers what belongs in a text and what belongs in an email). Email is where the relationship lives over months and years: the tips, the invitations, the check-ins that keep a customer ordering because they trust you. Every habit in this post protects your ability to reach those people at all.
A smaller list of people who open your emails will always do more for your business than a big list of people who never see them. If you’ve imported the contact list from your Young Living Virtual Office into your email tool, you may have hundreds or even thousands of names sitting in your contacts. Many of them enrolled under someone else in your organization. They’re part of your team, and that’s wonderful, but most of them have never said yes to getting emails from you. We’ll come back to what to do with that file, because it’s one of the biggest reasons good emails stop getting delivered.
Send Your Young Living Emails From an Address Inboxes Trust
Most Brand Partners send their emails from the free address they’ve always had, like Gmail or Yahoo. In GetOiling, that’s usually the address you signed up with. It’s a perfectly good place to start. As your list grows and you email more people more often, though, the address you send from starts to work against you.
When a free address sends through a bulk sending tool (any tool that sends one email to many people at once, the way GetOiling does), inbox providers can’t verify it the way they can verify an address on your own domain, meaning the yourname.com part of a website address you own. Anyone can open a Gmail account, including the folks sending scams, so a Gmail address sending to a list looks, to the provider, like any other Gmail address sending to a list. An address on your own domain, like hello@yourname.com or yourfirstname@yourbusinessname.com, signals professionalism and trust to the provider and to the person reading.
The other half is the mail server, the computer your emails are sent from. GetOiling gives every account a shared server to send from, and you can absolutely send from it. Shared means your reputation is pooled with everyone else using it, including the person who just started and hasn’t learned any of this yet. A custom mail server on your own domain separates your sending from theirs. There are technical records behind all of this with names like SPF, DKIM and DMARC, and you don’t need to know what any of them mean. The GetOiling team can get you a domain, host your email on it, and set up the mail server for you. If you already have a domain and an email address on it, we’ll connect what you have or show you what needs to happen. Email support@getoiling.com to get started, and if you’re still deciding on a domain, our walkthrough on custom domains for your Young Living website explains how that piece works.
Once the new address exists, the main email address on your account is set in My Contact Info, which you’ll find in the menu under your name in GetOiling. Put the new address in the email field and save, and GetOiling asks you to verify it before it’s used. The video shows exactly where that field is.
Get Saved in Your Young Living Customers’ Contacts
Think about your own inbox. An email from someone in your contacts gets treated differently from an email from a stranger. Inbox providers know that too, so a sender the reader has saved as a contact is more likely to reach the main inbox. It also tells your customer you’re someone they know and welcome, which is the whole point.
So ask people to save you, and make it a one-tap job. The tool for that is a contact card: a small file holding your name, your logo or photo, your email and your key links (the file name ends in .vcf, which phones and computers know how to open). Here’s the whole path, from making the card to the link a new subscriber taps.
- Make the card on your phone. In your phone’s contacts app, create a contact for your business. Fill in your business name, email, phone and website links, and add your logo, or a photo of you, as the contact photo.
- Email it to yourself. Open that contact, tap Share, and send it by email to your own address. The email arrives with one attachment, a file whose name ends in .vcf. That attachment is your contact card.
- Save the file to your computer. Open that email on your computer and download the attachment, so the .vcf file sits in your Downloads folder.
- Upload it to GetOiling. In your GetOiling menu, open Content Library and click Files. On the My Files page, click Select Or Drop Files and choose the .vcf file, or drag the file onto that box. It appears in your files with a small VCF label.
- Copy its link. On that file, click the three dots (More actions) and choose Get Link. A message reads “Link to file copied to clipboard!” and the link is ready to paste.
Now put that link in two places a new person sees first.
First, your confirmation page. If you have a sign-up page for a free download or your newsletter, the confirmation page is the page people see right after they sign up. Open it in the page editor and add a line like “Before you go, add me to your contacts so you don’t miss what’s headed your way.” Highlight “add me to your contacts,” click the link icon in the editor’s toolbar, paste your link into the URL box and click Insert.
Second, the first message of every campaign. A campaign is a series of emails GetOiling sends on its own, and its first message goes out the moment someone is added to it. Add the same line there and link it the same way.
Coach Ashley pastes the contact card link into a confirmation page and into the first message of a campaign in the video. From then on, every new person who joins your list gets the chance to save you before your second email ever arrives. If you text your customers too, the same contact card link works beautifully in your first text message.
Then test it from your customer’s side. On your phone, sign up for your own free download or newsletter, tap the link on the confirmation page, and tap it again in the first email that arrives. Each time, your card should open with your name, logo and details, ready to save. If it doesn’t, copy the link again with Get Link and paste it over the old link on “add me to your contacts” in the page and in the message. If the card still won’t open, bring it to the Weekly Work Session and we’ll look at it with you.
Write Young Living Emails That Land in the Main Inbox
If you use Gmail, you know the Promotions tab. It’s where the shoe sale, the glasses sale and every store you’ve ever bought from end up, and most of us skim right past it on our way to the emails that matter. You want your email in the main inbox, sitting with the messages from friends, family and colleagues. How your email is written and built decides a lot of that.
Start with your first sentence. In most inboxes, the first line of your email shows up right beside the subject line before anyone opens it. If that line is “Hi Sarah,” you’ve spent your best preview space on a greeting. Open with something useful or curious instead, then put the greeting on the second line. More opens mean a better sending reputation over time, so that one sentence earns its keep twice.
Then look at how the email is built. Emails with lots of images, heavy styling, many fonts and colors, ALL CAPS and sales words like “buy now” read as promotions to the inbox providers, and that’s exactly where they send them. A heavily designed newsletter can also arrive as a blank email on a phone with a weak signal, because the pictures never load. A short, conversational email with one image at most reads the way a friend’s email reads. It loads on any phone, it’s quick to read, and your people learn that opening your emails is worth their time.
When you do use an image, give it alternative text: a few words describing the picture. In the GetOiling email editor, click the image and choose Alternative Text on the toolbar that pops up. It’s a fallback for people who use screen readers and for inboxes that don’t show images, and an email tester flags every image that’s missing it (more on testing below). Check your signature image too, because it rides along on every email you send.
This doesn’t mean you can never make something pretty, and you can certainly design beautiful emails in GetOiling’s email builder when the occasion calls for it. Just keep those for occasional sends, because a sender who mostly sends promotions gets sorted with promotions. Young Living already sends gorgeous product pictures. What Young Living can’t do is have a relationship with your customers, and that relationship is what your emails are for: the tip that helps with their week, the invitation to your next class, the check-in after their first order. The products show up inside those conversations, because they’re part of the changes your people want to make.
If you use GetOiling’s done-for-you Weekly Wellness Tips (a ready-made weekly email series for your customers and leads), you’ll notice they’re already written this way: no images, a compelling first line before the greeting, and every message written to get an open, a click and a reply.
Can You Email Your Whole Young Living Virtual Office List? How to Warm Up New, Imported and Old Lists
It’s so tempting. The Virtual Office file is right there, full of names and email addresses, and it would take five minutes to import it and send everyone a newsletter today. Please don’t. Most of the people in that file enrolled under someone else in your organization, and they never asked to hear from you. Emailing a list of strangers means low opens, ignored emails and spam reports, and every one of those lowers how inbox providers treat everything you send next, including the emails to your own customers who love hearing from you.
Instead, invite your personally enrolled to sign up for your updates during your care calls, and make that part of how you welcome every new customer. When you upload your VO file each month, the new people in your organization land in your contacts, and that’s the moment for one short, personal note to just those new people, sent in small groups: an invitation to join your updates or book time with you, never your newsletter. And always use tags (labels you put on contacts, like “customer” or “class guest”) to choose who an email goes to. When you send a message from your dashboard and leave the tags empty, it goes to every contact in your account, leads and imports included. The video shows that screen so you know exactly what to look for.
Warm up every new contact on purpose. For each new person on your list, you want an open, a click and a reply as early as possible. Put a clickable link in the first message of your campaign (your freebie is perfect), end your emails with a question that’s easy to answer, and use your confirmation page to say “check your email, I just sent you something.”
Old lists need the same care. If you’re coming back from a break, or you have names from past vendor events or former clients you haven’t emailed in six months or more, a sudden email to all of them at once can trigger filtering. Tag those contacts when you import them (something like “legacy” works), and re-engage them in small batches with plain, personal messages before you send anything promotional. Treat the first email back like a first email: something valuable to click and a clear reason to reply.
The same goes for a list you’re moving over from another tool. Even if those people know you and have been opening your emails for years, the inbox providers don’t know your new sending setup yet. Ramp up slowly instead of mailing everyone on day one.
How to Test Your Young Living Emails Before You Send Them
Even a well-written email can trip a filter on a small technical detail. You can find out before it reaches your customers with a free tool called Mail Tester. It gives you a test email address. Add that address to a contact in GetOiling, send your email to that contact, and Mail Tester scores the message and tells you what pulled the score down. (The test has to go to a contact, because GetOiling’s preview button only sends to your own address.)
You’ll see Coach Ashley run a test send through Mail Tester and read the score. The test email is a busy newsletter template on purpose, full of images and buttons, so you can watch what a tester flags: too little text compared to images, and images with no alt text. A handy trick from the video: save the email you want to test with Create Saved Reply From Message, so you can send the exact same message to your tester contact in a couple of clicks.
Try it on your next newsletter before it goes to your list. Fix what the tester flags, send it again, and watch the score move.
Got questions about your own emails? Bring them to the Weekly Work Session, our live group Q&A and hands-on help session, Thursdays at 12pm ET. Bring whatever you’re working on. Save your spot for the Weekly Work Session.
Keep Growing Your Young Living Email List With Us
If you’d like to see what a finished Brand Partner site looks like, browse a sample GetOiling website or the full set of tools to run your Young Living business. When you want to talk it through with other Brand Partners, join us in the GetOiling Facebook group or live at the Weekly Work Session on Thursdays. Not on GetOiling yet? The free Lead Generation Workshop shows you how to build the list these emails go to, and the done-for-you Weekly Wellness Tips give you a month of emails already written. Ready to set it up yourself? Start for $1 for your first month. If you’d rather have it done for you, our Concierge team builds websites, funnels and landing pages to order, and if you know what you want to build and just need the steps, Build with GetOiling shows you how. Next, read how a contact preferences page lets every contact choose email, text or both, so the people on your list keep hearing from you the way they want.
