How can you tell if your email marketing campaigns are healthy? Open rates and click rate right? Wrong. There is a metric that is often forgotten, email deliverability. The statistic that counts the percentage of emails delivered.
There are some emails that are not delivered to your customer, they don’t even make it to the inbox to be opened or clicked on. A poor email deliverability rate is a serious issue and highlights that your email marketing lists are not healthy.
One of the main causes for emails failing to be delivered comes down to customers submitting incorrect email addresses. But that is not the only reasons emails fail to be delivered. It is time for you to learn how to improve email deliverability and score big.
As we have mentioned, there are a number of reasons emails fail to reach the mail box of the intended recipient. Here are the top ways to improve email deliverability:
Sender Reputation
The ISP or Inbox Service Provider has an automatic score that they calculate, and if your sender score goes below the recommended amount they will stop sending your emails or will banish your emails straight into the junk folder. The sender reputation score is calculated using spam reports and unsubscribe metrics. The more emails that go unread and the higher the unsubscribe rate you have, the more likely it is that you will begin to develop a poor sender reputation.
You can see your sender score here, it’s important that you keep an eye on it from time to time.
Use a Double Opt-In
Having people on your email lists that just don’t want to be there will have a negative impact on your email deliverability. In the very least, all your users should have opted in to your email list, on their own.
Most companies only send one opt-in, where customers sign up on the main site and then start getting emails. A double opt-in is when the first email sent includes another opt-in, prompting the customer to click on a link and confirm their subscription. This ensures that the user really does want to sign up.
Single opt-ins are likely to generate more spam complaints. With most ISP’s blocking senders for more than 2-3 spam complaints per 1000 email recipients, you will quickly find yourself in the poor email deliverability firing range.
You don’t want that to happen to you, so make sure to ask every subscriber to confirm their email subscription. Be creative about it. You can send a thank you email or a welcome email, thanking and welcoming your new subscriber to your list and offering them some of your best content or products.
Source: CampaignMaster
Send small batches of emails
When you send your email to everyone at once you are likely to get a larger bounce rate which as we have learnt will lower your sender score.
If you segment your email list into smaller more manageable sections then you are more likely to provide content that matters to your email recipients. Start with sending emails to your most engaged customers first, this will help you establish a strong email reputation score and keep your deliverability rate up.
But what do you do about all the emails that keep bouncing?
Clean Your Email List
It’s a very good idea to clean your email list regularly. Delete all of the emails that are producing an error or are repeatedly bouncing back.
Also pay attention to those recipients who fail to open your emails, period.
Before you delete them why not send another opt-in to those customers. And if they fail to reply there is nothing wrong with getting rid of those people that aren’t engaged.
If you don’t want to be that aggressive you could simply segment a part of your list to include all those people that haven’t opened your emails in the last 12 months. Then you exclude that list every time you send something.
If the sender then re-engages with you and opens an email then they are automatically put back on the regular list.
Your sender score will only get better, and your email list will become more effective.
Check the Blacklists
It’s a really good idea to check the status of your IP to ensure that you have not been blacklisted. You can use this tool to do so, and to set up a monitoring service.
It’s important to check routinely.
Tweak the From Field
Sometimes the name that you put on your from field can land you on the spam list of a recipient.
Some companies just put their first name, or their first and last name, instead of putting where the email is from. Although putting a personal name on an email is a great personalization tactic it needs to be done correctly.
Instead of putting from just “Kim”, you might think about writing “Kim from Remarkety” for increased clarity. This way your customer is less likely to click on that spam button when they see your email.
Add a second unsubscribe link
Do you know what a “lazy unsubscribe” is? When a customer doesn’t find or is too lazy to scroll to the bottom of your email to find the unsubscribe button. Instead they click on the spam button, why? Well, because they know it will have the same effect.
You definitely want to minimize the amount of people that put you on their spam list. Like we said earlier, it might reduce your sender score and will lead to more emails being blocked.
Best practice is to put a second unsubscribe link at the top of your email. That way everyone that wants to unsubscribe can do so easily.
Conclusion
Improving email deliverability is easy and necessary.
It is necessary because it will:
- Improve the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts
- Prevent you from being banned
- Increase your revenue
It is easy because all it requires from you is a few simple tweaks:
Filter out the bad apples
Add an additional opt-in and/or unsubscribe buttons
Check your ISP
Having a healthly email lists will help you to ensure that your emails are going to the right audience. All that is left for you to do is to perfect your email segmentation and personalization.
Cheers!
