What's the secret to improving email deliverability?

The secret to higher email deliverability is to send emails your audience wants to receive. Full stop. Simple - but not always easy.

While email deliverability is a subject of your DKIM and the cleanliness of your list, the ideas shared in this article are about email inbox placements. While customer segmentation is a great practice to improve overall engagement on your email campaigns, but it will not help you with your current campaign. This is a god-to-follow best practice for future email reputation building. Customer segmentation for promotional campaigns should be done on more than one segmentation dimension. Lifecycle campaigns on the other hand require customer segmentation based on both behavioral events and lifecycle stages.

Improving email deliverability hinges on deeply understanding your audience, blending UX principles with email marketing strategies. Segmenting and personalizing content based on user behavior and preferences, utilizing responsive design for mobile users, and engaging in A/B testing to refine emails ensure they resonate. Ethical data use and fostering trust enhance open rates, making emails not just delivered but welcomed. This approach, rooted in a rich background in UX and Web Development, offers a nuanced pathway to connect with your audience in the crowded digital space.

Knowing your audience in email marketing is crucial because it allows you to tailor your content to their preferences, needs, and behaviors. Understanding your audience enables you to create more relevant and personalized messages, increasing the likelihood of engagement and positive responses. This targeted approach fosters stronger connections, improves open and click-through rates, and ultimately enhances the overall effectiveness of your email campaigns.

The key to enhancing email deliverability lies in implementing a holistic approach that addresses various aspects of email marketing. Firstly, maintaining a clean and engaged email list is paramount. Regularly prune inactive subscribers and ensure that you have explicit consent for every contact on your list to comply with data protection regulations. Authentication protocols, including SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, should be properly configured to validate your emails and prevent phishing attempts, bolstering your sender reputation. Craft compelling and relevant email content to engage recipients and reduce the likelihood of your emails being marked as spam.

Emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened. Use what you've learned about your subscribers (and don't forget to greet them by name - with a fallback).

Your subject line is like the headline of a newspaper - it needs to grab attention in an instant. Crafting subject lines that are intriguing yet clear can significantly boost open rates. Avoiding potential spam triggers and testing various styles helps refine what resonates with your audience. Personalizing subject lines, when done right, can create a sense of connection, making your email stand out in a crowded inbox.

Optimizing your subject line in email marketing is crucial because it directly impacts open rates. A compelling and well-crafted subject line captures the recipient's attention, entices them to open the email, and sets the tone for the content inside. It significantly influences the success of your email campaign by increasing engagement and click-through rates, ultimately contributing to the overall effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

Your subject line should be as short as possible. It'll grab their attention and stand out in their inbox. Testing subject lines is the best way to determine what type of subject lines work best for you. A small tip is to also test a subject line where all letters are in lowercase

The strike called - subject line, make it or break it. Here are three unconventional tips: 1. Numeric Appeal: Apply the resume trick—add numbers to your subject lines for instant attention. 2. Emoji Embrace: Infuse personality by incorporating emojis when suitable, creating a visually engaging preview. (drawback - not compatible with few ESPs) 3. Emotional Triggers: Convey urgency or emotion-triggering words to evoke immediate interest, fostering a sense of scarcity. Mastering these strategies enhances your subject lines, boosting email deliverability.????

As email deliverability consultants, we've seen, over and over again, that 99% of all deliverability problems are tied to bad data. Only sending emails to hand-raisers who know your brand and implementing a data-driven hygiene policy is the very best practice.

Unsubscribe! This one button is your best friend. All your hard-work goes for a toss if people start reporting you as spam. Another important thing to keep in mind is to ensure that your HTML script is kept to a minimum. The more HTML elements in your emails, the higher the chances of your emails landing in promotions, updates, forums, or even spam.

What are the best practices? 1. Authenticate your email 2. Send email to the people that are expecting it (opt-ins) 3. Make your messages as relevant as possible 4. Make the quality of that content better than average Do that, and everything should fall into place.

- Design for accessibility: good contrast, legible fonts, screen reader friendly structure. - Prioritize mobile friendliness: more and more people read their emails on their phones. - Test with dark mode: many a beautiful email look terrible in dark mode.

7 deliverability best practices (the basics): - Gather good quality authentic data - Send content people are expecting and want - Optimise for different devices and dark mode - Make them easy to skim - Establish a good sending rhythm - Clean your list regularly - Use a reputable email platform

Deliverability rate, Hard and Soft bounce rates are the most important KPIs to monitor to improve deliverability. But you must also be very cautious about any drops of other indicators. For exemple, a drop in open rate could mean that an email service provider is starting to consider your emails as Spam. In that case, analyze the main email KPIs per ESPs (gmail, outlook, yahoo, etc...) to check if one of them is more impacted than the others and immediately filter this one from your email list to prevent being blacklisted.

While you need to be monitoring metrics such as bounce rate, blocklistings, spam complaints, and unsubscribes, those are all just symptoms of the number one thing that makes or breaks your deliverability, which is engagement: watch your opens, clicks, replies, and conversions to really know how you're doing, allowing you to correct problems before it affects your sender score, bounce rate, spam rate, and ultimate inbox placement.

Prioritize absolute metrics like: - spam complaint rates: direct indicator of recipient's perception of email as unwanted. Sadly, some people always mark emails as spam even when they aren't. - bounce rates: reflect your email list health rates and highlight deliverability issues. - unsubscribe rates: give you direct feedback on content relevance.

Sender reputation and score is equally vital as any user engagement metrics. As these directly influence your emails' journey to the inbox. Regularly using tools like spam and blacklist checkers ensures you're not unknowingly steering off course. By staying vigilant and responsive to these metrics, you can significantly enhance your email deliverability.

The biggest mistake that many agencies make is focusing solely on revenue and basing decisions on the revenue generated from a campaign or flow. However, examining other metrics such as deliverability, open rate, and click rate could provide much more insight into the strengths and weaknesses of your email strategy.

While it may seem counterintuitive to build relationships, providing a clear and easy way for recipients to unsubscribe across all your communication touchpoints is essential for maintaining good deliverability. By making it simple for people to opt-out, you reduce the chances of them marking your emails as spam, which can harm your reputation and your chances of them re-subscribing and doing business with you in the future. Always strike the appropriate balance when it comes to your email-sending frequency to prevent overloading your subscribers, which can quickly sour connections, set off spam filters, and cause them to unsubscribe.

Asking for replies is my favorite tactic here. The trick with replies, is you need a response mechanism that is real and personal. For example, for one client, we set up an email in the welcome flow from his executive assistant. It's a simple, short email just offering assistance in getting in contact with this client. It has an 80+% open rate and a 15.67% response rate. And his EA handles each email reply and gets it to the right place. But this email has done more for building relationships than almost any other email. Do things that don't scale. It pays off.

Also build relationships with marketing professionals in your industry. They often have great insights that are relevant to your business.

Subject lines and preview text only go so far. Your name matters most and when your subscribers feel excited about your emails because you give them tremendous value, help them, and support them, your deliverability will remain high. When your friends email you, the subject line doesn't do much in making you open the email. Because it's from your friend is the primary reason you open the email.

Building a relationship with your subscribers is one of the most important deliverability strategies. And it's talked about the least. Tick the 'best practice' boxes, sure. But there aren't any tricks or hacks here. Use good authentic, organic data. Send good, relevant emails. That's it.

Doing the same things over and over again and expecting a different outcome is the epitome of madness. You cannot make your deliverability better if you just assume it's working fine! With everything in email marketing, just because it's worked once with a specific group of people doesn't mean you've found a formula to allow rinse and repeat success. People are fickle, we change what we engage with, what we like, how we like to be communicated with on a daily basis. You must factor an element of testing and improvement into your emails, even if it is small things, like regular subject line A/B testing. Most modern-day ESPs will allow you to run tests easily - DON'T BE LAZY, keep trying new things!

Il est très important de test différentes approches comme les objets de courriels, le contenu, l'heure d'envoi, etc. Cela permettra de dégager une tendance pour votre marque. Ainsi par example avec un client de beauté, nous avons trouvé que 80% de son audience était plus engagé le soir après 8h. Or le client envoyait ses emails le matin à 6h, ce qui réduisait considérablement sa portée.

Absolutely, testing and optimizing your email strategy is essential. Experiment with subject lines, content, design, timing, and segmentation using A/B or multivariate testing to see what works best. Stay updated with email marketing trends and learn from successful examples to continually improve your approach and boost deliverability.

Authentication is critical, and becoming more so with new requirements by Google and Yahoo, with more to follow. SPF/DKIM/DMARC may sound like alphabet soup, but you need them on your side.

In addition to optimized content, frequently overlooked technical factors of your email infrastructure can have a significant impact on email deliverability! Your sender's reputation plays a crucial role in determining whether your emails make it to the inbox or get marked as spam. To enhance your reputation, focus on maintaining a clean email list, regularly removing inactive or bouncing addresses, and implementing proper authentication protocols such as SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) is essential. These protocols verify the authenticity of your email and help ISPs (Internet Service Providers) recognize you as a legitimate sender.

Let’s get to the basics first. Fix your sender identity. Your sender identity is like your email marketing ID card. ISPs (Internet Service Providers) scrutinize it to assess your credibility. For example, when your sender name and profile picture consistently represent your brand, your sender identity strengthens, and your emails are more likely to reach the inbox. Also, authentication protocols and engagement metrics could be a few of the other factors that can help tackle deliverability issues.

Authentication is tops right now: Google and Yahoo are requiring SPF/DKIM/DMARC for bulk senders, and others are likely to follow.

One place to start is the number and size of images used in your email. I've seen some of the largest brands make this mistake just because of the convenience + design ease of using an image/images through the entirety of an email. Spam filters are smarter and a too many images and very little text = spammy.