Are Your Emails Reaching the Inbox? 10 DIY Ways to Improve Your Delivery Rate

There’s nothing more heart-breaking than spending hours crafting the ideal email subject line, copy, and call-to-action only to find out the email never made it to your customer’s inbox. Email deliverability is an important element of sending well-performing email. If your emails aren’t getting delivered, then your email marketing efforts are a waste of time, resources and money. If you don’t want this to happen, then you need to figure out the best ways  to improve your email deliverability. This is the reason we’ve prepared this article for you.

In this article, you’ll learn why it is essential to track email deliverability. You’ll also learn 10 DIY ways to improve your email deliverability.  

Let's get started!

Table of contents

1. What is email deliverability?
2. Why is it essential to track email deliverability?
3. 10 DIY ways to improve your email delivery rate
4. Wrapping up
   

What is email deliverability?

Email deliverability is a metric that measures the ability of your email to reach your recipient’s email inbox. It also measures the success of your email placement in your recipient’s inbox folder. In other words, where your emails reach once they are delivered- whether it's the primary inbox, promotional tab, spam folder or any other folder.

As a marketer, you can use email deliverability to track if your emails are reaching your customers’ inboxes or not.

Email deliverability is based on three factors:

Identification: this defines some terms that represent the identity attached to the emails you send to your recipients’ inbox such as sender’s policy framework, domain based message authentication.

It's just like having a passport. It includes every information regarding your identity. You can be identified as Jane Doe, the savvy email marketer from North America.

Reputation: your sender’s reputation reveals how trustworthy your emails are. Internet service providers have a score based on how your subscribers treat your emails. So, giving your subscribers emails that generate positive behaviour is one of the best ways to improve email deliverability.

Email copy: if your email isn’t relevant and valuable to your audience, it can lead to poor deliverability. You need to tailor your message to what interests your customers to create a better impact.

Why is it essential to track email deliverability?

The answer to this question might be obvious. The goal of tracking email deliverability is to identify whether your emails get delivered or not. However, this is beyond the case.

Here are two reasons why tracking email deliverability is important for your email marketing efforts.

1. To determine what content works for your audience

Tracking email deliverability enables marketers to figure out the type of content that resonates with subscribers. As a result, we can know how emails are performing.

2. To know if subscribers received emails or not

Email deliverability helps you to figure out the subscribers that opened their emails. As a result, you’ll be able to identify the most active subscribers on your mailing list and other factors that can help boost engagement.

Note: While deliverability rate can be a good metric to track, it can also be misleading. You don’t only track email deliverability to ensure your emails get delivered. As we mentioned earlier, there are different folders your emails could end up in. You want your email to end up in your customer’s inbox, not spam folder or any other folder. In other words, the main goal of email deliverability is to get good inbox placement. You have a deliverability issue when your email gets delivered but ends up in the spam folder.

10 DIY ways to improve your email deliverability

Now that we’ve addressed the basics of email deliverability, what does this mean for your email marketing strategy? In this section, we share 10 DIY ways to improve your email deliverability.

1. Check your sender reputation

A low sender’s score is usually a major contributor to poor email deliverability. Internet service providers calculate your sender’s score based on how subscribers respond to your emails such as unsubscribes and spam reports. When you have an excellent sender’s score, your emails get delivered to your subscriber’s inbox. A poor sender’s score, on the other hand, will make your emails land in the junk folder, hence leading to poor email deliverability. ISPs will automatically reject your emails if it falls below a certain score. You can get your sender score from senderscore.org. Here is an example of a good sender’s score.

2. Filter your mailing list

A good mailing list hygiene is necessary for maintaining a good email deliverability. If you’re sending emails to inactive subscribers, you'll have to deal with high bounce rates. Even worse, your send credibility could be destroyed. Consider removing inactive subscribers from your list. You can filter out recipients that haven’t opened or engaged with your emails for a few months. Another thing that can cause poor email deliverability is spam traps. These are email addresses that look real but are used to identify spammers. Sending an email to one can mean a spammy practice. So, consider removing invalid email addresses from your list.

3. Send emails at the right frequency

How would you feel if you receive emails too often, even at times when you don’t need them? You’ll most likely get tired of them. The same goes for your subscribers. Put yourself in their shoes. If you send emails at the wrong frequency, they wouldn’t hesitate to unsubscribe from your mailing list. For this reason, you need to send just the appropriate number of emails. One email per week is a good number to start with. As you move forward, you can scale it up to two emails per week. Just ensure that you share really valuable content.

4. Include compelling subject lines to your emails

If your subject lines are not compelling enough, your email deliverability would be poor. Subject lines create your email’s first impression. Do they spark curiosity? Are they enticing? You need to use words that would trigger your audience to open your emails. Just like the example below;

5. Include easy unsubscribe options in your emails

In most emails, you’ll find an unsubscribe option. So, ensure that you provide a way for subscribers to opt-out of your mailing list. A link at the email footer is a good way to start. Providing an easy unsubscribe option can help boost engagement rate because you’ll be sending your emails to an audience that are interested in your emails.  

6. Use a double opt-in for new subscribers

A double opt-in ensures that new subscribers confirm their subscription in your inbox. As a result, your list will only include high value subscribers that are interested in your emails. This will help improve your engagement rates as well as email deliverability.

7. Ensure your emails are personal

Personalization is an important element in your emails. However, this goes beyond including your recipient’s name in your emails. You need to deliver relevant content that resonates with your audience. In most cases, this calls for segmentation. With customer segments, you can deliver relevant content to customers based on customer behaviour and how they interact with your emails. This way, you’ll be sending emails that customers actually want to read.

8. Don’t use a no reply sender’s address

Using a no-reply sender’s address in your emails can cause more harm than good. It can cause poor communication between you and your customers. This type of email address usually ends up in spam folders. So, there’s a chance of customers never receiving your emails. If you want to get better email deliverability, you need to use an email address that your recipients would appreciate. For example, [email protected].

9. Implement a Sender Policy Framework (SPF)

If you want to improve your trustworthiness to your recipient’s email server, then you need to implement a sender policy framework. The server confirms that your domain name and IP address is legitimate. This means that failure to implement a sender policy framework can make your emails rejected. This blog post from Dmarcly explains how to set up a sender policy framework.

10. Maintain a consistent send schedule

Sending emails randomly isn’t a good email marketing practice. It can lead to a low sender score and IP rejection. Figure out a schedule that works for you and your audience then stick to it. This way, your subscribers will know when to expect your emails, hence improving your email deliverability.

Wrapping Up

To get optimum results from your email marketing efforts, your email must get delivered to your customer’s inbox. This involves creating good subject lines, compelling copy and ensuring you maintain a good sender’s reputation.

Remember, monitoring your customer behaviour and engagement levels of subscribers will give you a better idea of the content that your subscribers are interested in. As a result, you’ll be able to tailor relevant content that they will resonate with, hence improving your email deliverability.

At Engage, we help businesses track customer preferences, properties, events and actions so they can create customer segments and send automated personalized messages that foster growth and retention. Sign up now.