RE:markable is the weekly email about emails (coming soon). It will drop the latest email marketing news, updates, insights, free resources, upcoming masterclasses, webinars, and of course, a little inbox mischief.
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You’re sending the best email of your career (if you do say so yourself) and the anticipation (and perspiration) is high… no pressure.
Only, there isn’t any pressure because your email didn’t deliver, and now your hopes and dreams are shattered.
Okay, not quite.
But when it comes to email marketing, email deliverability is the often-overlooked yet extremely essential element of your email marketing strategy. If you want people to read your emails, you need to enhance your deliverability to make sure they get them in their inbox.
Here’s our simple guide to email deliverability.
Email deliverability refers to the process of your emails reaching your subscriber’s inboxes successfully and as intended.
The biggest, nastiest barriers to this are the spam folder or bouncing (an email rejected by a mail server).
Your emails landing in the spam folder or bouncing are big no-nos specifically for their impact on your overall reputation, alongside the associated lack of engagement and overlooking of all your hard work on a campaign. Plus, to add insult to injury, the more of your emails that get flagged as spam, thus negatively impacting your data in the long term, the more likely it is that your future emails will land in spam too.
Talk about a nightmare roundabout!
Remember: more emails do not equal more sales.
Though there are a variety of factors influencing deliverability, the batch and blast mentality of sending more emails under the assumption that it will result in more sales can also contribute to email deliverability problems. It’s far better to send a personalised message to a specific audience at the right time than yell at an audience of thousands repeatedly, day in and day out, hoping that a handful will hand over their money.
So, now you know what email deliverability is, why don’t we dive into some of the finer details?
Firstly, it’s important to distinguish between delivery and deliverability.
If we were to summarise the key takeaway for your mindset towards your email marketing strategy, it’s that deliverability is also a common-sense practice of ‘reading the room’. You should know what to send your subscribers and when and match your messaging to their mindset rather than send emails blindly.
Then we can get into the technical details!
To know what to do you first need to know what to avoid, and a lot of the biggest pitfalls in email marketing come from working under false assumptions. Let’s get into the most common ones we see (and why they’re not true!).
Sender reputation
When it comes to your sender reputation, the evaluation of that reputation is done by Internet Service Providers (ISPs), which monitor your sender reputation to determine whether your messages will be let into the inbox or be booted out. Sender reputations are scored on a scale from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating a better reputation (and a higher likelihood of emails landing in the primary inbox).
Here’s how to improve your sender reputation:
Subscriber engagement
If you send emails to your subscribers that they love and open every time, deliverability won’t be much of an issue. A lack of engagement and the associated lack of opening of your emails can, however, be problematic for deliverability as it can lower your engagement rate and increase spam complaints, so keep content relevant and consistent.
Spam complaints and bounces
We’ve already mentioned that sending out the same content to your entire email list can spell disaster for your deliverability, and this is partly due to spam reports. ISPs monitor the spam complaints that your subscribers make, and a high number of complaints has a negative impact on your sender reputation and makes it likelier that your future emails will end up in the spam folder too.
Similarly, neglecting email list hygiene (removing any inactive or invalid emails regularly) can cause high bounce rates that cause your IP address or domain to be blacklisted after a while.
Email content and subject lines
Though spammy subject lines (think ‘free!!!’, ‘discount!’, or ‘BUY NOW’) aren’t actually enough to trigger spam filters, they can have an impact on spam complaints, given that many subscribers will send these emails straight to their spam folder because they feel like they’re being click-baited. The actual content of your email, however, can definitely trigger spam filters, so it’s best practice to avoid image-only content, too many external links, broken links or even redirects.
Email mindset comes first
Quality over quantity should be your primary mindset with your entire email strategy, as otherwise, you’ll inevitably slip into harmful habits that can be detrimental to your email deliverability. Keep in mind that emphasising quality doesn’t have to be complex – think about what your subscribers want to see and when they should see it and build your approach around this.
Regularly clean and maintain your email list: inactive or invalid emails can cause deliverability issues, so regularly maintaining email list hygiene is a must to avoid a bounce rate a trampoline would be jealous of.
Segment subscribers to send targeted emails: you can’t personalise content if you don’t segment your email list based on what they want to see from your business, whether they’ve specified their preferences on sign-up or you’re using your data to its full potential.
Send fewer, more relevant emails: this ties in with the above tip, but when you really focus on what your different subscriber segments want to see, you can focus on a steady quantity of a high quality. If your content is as personalised as it should be, less is more is absolutely the undying truth for your email marketing!
Use subscriber engagement as a guide: it’s simple, really – if a user isn’t engaging with your content, stop sending it to them or pay attention to any feedback you receive and adjust accordingly.
Read the room: whether it’s unsubscribes, feedback, open rates or click throughs, you need to be regularly temperature-checking your data to do more of what is working and dial back what isn’t.
Get into the habit of regularly removing inactive subscribers from your email list to keep your data relevant and clean. Avoid buying or renting email lists that can put your bounce rate through the roof and basically put red tape all over your sender reputation.
Test your email frequency to move towards fewer, more targeted campaigns with an emphasis on quality over quantity (we know we keep saying it but it’s really the best way to approach your email strategy!).
Encourage your subscribers to get involved by replying to emails and giving feedback, as this will boost your sender reputation and give you an indication of what your subscribers are enjoying about your content
Monitor your bounce rates and quickly remove invalid email addresses to avoid high bounce rates or being blacklisted.
Email deliverability really is a common-sense approach to being successful in your email marketing
When you look at email deliverability on the whole, it really is about a set of common-sense principles you regularly maintain to the benefit of your overall email strategy.
Once you understand your subscribers and audience, all you have to do is focus on delivering them the quality content they want to see rather than casting a net out far and wide without getting any bites.
If you’re unsure of how your current email deliverability might be impacting your email marketing, it might be time for a simple deliverability audit or health check to keep things running smoothly and efficiently.
We’d love to help you with a simple check-up or some strategic deliverability advice – get in touch here to find out more.
RE:markable is the weekly email about emails (coming soon). It will drop the latest email marketing news, updates, insights, free resources, upcoming masterclasses, webinars, and of course, a little inbox mischief.