Email deliverability is the ability of your emails to reach the inbox of your subscribers without being blocked, bounced, or marked as spam. It is a crucial factor for the success of your email marketing campaigns, as it affects your reputation, engagement, and conversions. In this article, you will learn some best practices to ensure email deliverability and avoid common pitfalls.
The first step to ensure email deliverability is to choose a reputable email service provider (ESP) that has high standards for email quality, security, and compliance. A good ESP will help you with authentication, sender reputation, bounce management, and spam prevention. It will also provide you with tools and analytics to monitor and improve your email performance. Do some research and compare different ESPs before you sign up for one.
Ensuring email deliverability is crucial to reach your audience and have your messages successfully land in their inboxes. One effective way to improve deliverability is by choosing a reliable email service provider (ESP). Here's how it helps and what to consider when selecting one: By selecting a reliable ESP that addresses these considerations, you can significantly improve your email deliverability, reach your audience effectively, and enhance the success of your email marketing campaigns.
The way ESPs operate behind the scenes can vary greatly, influencing the success of your email program. A few examples to consider when choosing an ESP: 1. How their mail servers are configured to handle bounces & suppressions and react to deliverability issues. 2. The types of email activity they allow (e.g. cold email), which can lead to a spammy reputation for all customers of that ESP. 3. The policies they enforce (or don't) to maintain a high-quality customer base and sender reputation. This includes the account sign-up/provisioning process as well as what happens after a new customer starts sending. 4. Quality of their reporting - does it enable senders to be self-sufficient in finding & solving their performance issues...or not?
**How to Improve Email Deliverability and Reach Subscribers’ Inboxes** **Email Authentication—These email authentication protocols—including Sender Policy Framework (SPF), Sender ID, DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and Domain Message Authentication Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) **Sender reputation—As the name implies, sender reputation indicates how trustworthy your organization is. **Use a dedicated IP address and private domain. **Make it quick and easy to unsubscribe. **Keep a clean list **Be sure that your content is relevant to your target audience. **Optimize your email sends for?frequency?and?cadence.
The second step to ensure email deliverability is to segment and update your email list regularly. Segmenting your email list means dividing it into smaller groups based on criteria such as interests, preferences, behavior, or demographics. This will help you to send more relevant and personalized emails to your subscribers, which will increase their engagement and loyalty. Updating your email list means removing inactive, invalid, or uninterested subscribers who do not open or click on your emails. This will reduce your bounce rate, spam complaints, and unsubscribes, which will improve your sender reputation and deliverability.
Be mindful about what data you accept into the platforms you manage, and do ask all the questions. Others may have different practices for handling data and may not share the same standards for data quality, consent, retention, etc. It's better to start those data hygiene conversations early and often. This way you can establish some level of common ground and mutual understanding before receiving any challenging requests or being faced with critical issues.
ABC = Always Be Cleaning: Segmenting and updating your email list is pivotal for targeted communication. By categorizing subscribers based on interests and behaviors, you can craft personalized content, fostering higher engagement and loyalty. Regularly cleansing inactive or uninterested contacts enhances deliverability, reducing bounce rates and spam complaints, bolstering your sender reputation.
The third step to ensure email deliverability is to craft engaging and compliant email content that provides value to your subscribers and meets the expectations of the email clients and the spam filters. To create engaging email content, you should use clear and catchy subject lines, compelling copy, attractive design, and strong calls to action. You should also test your emails for different devices, browsers, and email clients to ensure they display correctly and consistently. To create compliant email content, you should follow the best practices and regulations for email marketing, such as the CAN-SPAM Act, the GDPR, and the CASL. You should also avoid using spammy words, excessive punctuation, misleading claims, or attachments that could trigger the spam filters.
It’s all about engagement. If ISPs notice your audience opening and clicking your emails, you’re less likely to end up in the spam folder. This includes ensuring your emails are accessible in the way they’re coded, overall email design and ALT image texts. It’s an element that’s too often overlooked.
The most opened email is an email subject line that compels the user to open. Crafting a compelling email subject line is a strategic art that significantly impacts open rates. A concise and intriguing subject line creates curiosity, prompting users to explore the content within. Experimenting with personalization, urgency, and relevance can further enhance the effectiveness of your subject lines, capturing the attention of your audience.
The fourth step to ensure email deliverability is to optimize your email sending frequency and timing. Sending frequency refers to how often you send emails to your subscribers, while sending timing refers to when you send them. Both factors affect your email deliverability and your subscribers' response. To optimize your email sending frequency, you should find the right balance between keeping your subscribers engaged and not overwhelming them with too many emails. You can use metrics such as open rate, click rate, unsubscribe rate, and feedback to determine the optimal frequency for your email campaigns. To optimize your email sending timing, you should consider the time zone, the day of the week, the season, and the behavior of your subscribers. You can use tools such as A/B testing, analytics, and automation to find the best time to send your emails.
Mailbox providers are reviewing your past sending history to determine the fate of your future emails, and many of them (most notably, Gmail and Yahoo) have become very focused on recipient reactions and engagement as a leading indicator for what deserves to go to the inbox. Recipients who engage positively (opening, clicking, replying to emails, etc) will help improve sender reputation, whereas negative reactions such as spam complaints carry heavy weight within spam filters, potentially sending your mail to spam. While you will never exactly know why mailbox providers filtered your mail, monitoring your engagement metrics will guide you on when to send and which portions of your audience should (maybe) receive more vs less vs suppress.
Just after entering office, before lunch, after lunch, just before leaving work - and a short activity window after hours from 6-9pm. Tailoring your email sending frequency to match your audience's preferences ensures engagement without overwhelming them. Additionally, strategic timing, such as sending emails during peak activity hours, can maximize visibility and response rates.
Warm Your IP IP warming is a gradual process used by organizations to establish and strengthen their reputation by systematically increasing the volume of email sent over time to build trust and credibility, ensuring that emails reach recipients' inboxes rather than being filtered as spam. IP warming is essential in scenarios such as using New IP Address or using an Inactive/Dormant IP addresses for sending emails. Benefits of IP Warming: High Deliverability Enhanced Reputation Reduced Spam Filtering Better Engagement Protects Sending Domain Long-Term Deliverability By adhering to best practices, organizations can ensure that their emails reach the right audience, fostering lasting customer relationships and driving business success.
The fifth step to ensure email deliverability is to monitor and improve your email deliverability metrics. These are the indicators that measure how well your emails are reaching and engaging your subscribers. Some of the most important email deliverability metrics are delivery rate, open rate, click rate, bounce rate, spam rate, and unsubscribe rate. You should track and analyze these metrics regularly to identify and fix any issues that could affect your email deliverability. You should also use tools such as spam checkers, inbox placement tests, and sender score reports to evaluate and improve your email quality, reputation, and performance.
Deliverability is a lot like flying a plane…there’s not just one button that gets you into the air and another to land. There are many different levers and dials, and all of them have an impact on your overall ability to fly that plane safely. Similarly with email, there are many factors impacting where your mail lands. Just like a plane's dashboard, you must track all your metrics, not just one magical metric to beat them all. Get down to the provider level (e.g. @hotmail) to find more granular issues. Also be sure to track your results OVER TIME. This is more important than comparing yourself to others via benchmark reports. Those are helpful if you have no idea what 'good' looks like, but your best competitor is your past self here.
Make sure to keep your list clean by regularly removing inactive contacts. Also, watch your open, click and unsubscribe rates closely and make sure to keep them in a good state by segmenting your campaigns.
The sixth and final step to ensure email deliverability is to build trust and relationship with your subscribers. This means respecting their preferences, providing value, and encouraging feedback. You can build trust and relationship with your subscribers by using a consistent sender name and address, using a double opt-in process, sending a welcome email, asking for their feedback, and offering incentives or rewards. You can also use social media, surveys, polls, or webinars to interact with your subscribers and learn more about their needs and interests. By building trust and relationship with your subscribers, you will increase their loyalty, retention, and advocacy, which will boost your email deliverability and your email marketing goals.
Your domain trust is your most valuable brand identity online. Building and maintaining a strong domain trust is fundamental for online success, as it directly influences your website's search engine ranking and user confidence. Regularly updating and securing your website with SSL certificates not only enhances domain trust but also protects user data, reinforcing your brand's credibility. Consistent, quality content creation and ethical online practices further contribute to a positive online reputation, solidifying your domain trust and brand identity.
Most deliverability issues stem from marketers missing the inbox forest for the trees. They follow *some* best practices like authentication or list hygiene to a tee but don't collect an opt-in before sending. Or maybe they've gotten permission but start sending different content than what people signed up for…daily. ?? Each mailbox provider uses different algorithms to make their email filtering decisions, but they’re all working to ensure each message they deliver is safe for their recipients as well as wanted and valued. By putting the recipient at the center of your email marketing strategy—sending emails that are truly helpful or important (to the recipient, not to you, dear marketer)—reaching the inbox becomes a lot less difficult.