How to improve email deliverability

Email is a powerful and unique marketing stream for all businesses, through which they can communicate directly with their contacts about important updates, company news, and products and services. However, the way people interact with those emails has major consequences on the continuing effectiveness of email as a marketing tool.

Here’s a snippet from our latest ebook - The guide to email deliverability - sharing best practices to follow with every email campaign you send.

How to improve email deliverability

Think of email deliverability as a formula: more positive signals (opens, clicks) than negative signals (unsubscribes, ‘mark as spam’) will improve inbox placement and increase brand visibility and engagement.

Ortto’s Head of Email Deliverability, Travis Hazlewood asks that marketers, above all, provide an email experience that’s “secure, transparent, engaging, and respectful.” Doing so will give them the best chance of earning inbox.

There are three main pillars of deliverability: Get consent, engage meaningfully, and be human. Let’s explore each of these.

1. Get consent

Active subscriber consent is the foundation of strong email deliverability.

How you gather your subscribers and empower them to control their subscription preferences can make or break your deliverability experience.

If you are emailing people who do not want to be contacted by you, your open rate will be low and your bounce rates and unsubscribes will soar. This will affect your domain reputation and, in turn, your deliverability. Needless to say, it’ll also affect your brand reputation.

Ensure that you are clearly communicating how subscribers can opt into your marketing emails and retain control over their preferences, and empower them to make decisions about what they want to receive. As an email sender, you must honor their preferences to maintain trust and build a list of engaged subscribers.

2. Engage meaningfully

Work with your subscribers to identify their desires and expectations, as this will fuel engagement and subsequently improve deliverability. A big component of engaging meaningfully is to personalize content.

This involves:

• Personalizing email subject lines
• Segmenting audience lists and sending only relevant content
• Ensuring content is highly focused and timely
• Utilizing A/B testing to identify effective approaches
• Providing a robust preference center experience for subscribers to set up-to-date preferences

Senders should also respect recipients by providing unsubscribe accessibility:

• Elevate accessibility of the Unsubscribe button so that people choose it over the Spam button
• Utilize two-click unsubscribe
• Remember: An Unsubscribe is much better than a complaint

Between passive methods like adjusting strategies based on subscriber engagement, to active methods like subscribers updating their preferences and contact fields, there are so many ways that a targeted, meaningful approach to your marketing content can be achieved.

3. Be human

The final building block is simple but often overlooked: be human. Be human in the way you speak to your subscribers; in the way you honor their preferences, and in the way you earn their trust.

The goal is to be as authentic and as personal as possible in a way that provides value and, in turn, earns the subscriber’s attention.

Earn is the keyword. We know that the average person gets over 100 emails per day, and likely doesn’t have the time or desire to sift through them all. So, to grab their attention and amp up your email open rates and click-through rates, you should appeal to your subscribers’ interests and make them feel seen. The best way to do this is through engaging, natural language.

“It’s not ideal to use [spam words like] ‘Free’ or all capital letters and a thousand exclamation points, because it’s not human. It’s not respectful.”

- Travis Hazlewood, Head of Email Deliverability at Ortto

For a deeper look into email deliverability, download our free ebook - The guide to email deliverability