Ways to improve email deliverability and avoid spam
For most marketing professionals, email marketing is one of the most successful marketing strategies.
According to Statista.com, email marketing offers a return on investment (ROI) of $45 on every $1 spent.
About 320 billion emails were sent and received each day in 2021 alone. Your customers already have an inbox overflowing with emails from your competitors, and it's already a challenge to win their attention.
To achieve the success that comes with investing in email marketing, just sending emails isn’t enough.
You also need an excellent approach to ensure your emails get to your customers' inboxes, to begin with, then your emails also need to engage your customers.
Well,
At Engage, we tell our clients that while we can automate the way they send emails, we also guarantee that their emails will get into their subscribers' inboxes if certain tips can be followed.
Let’s look at what happens when you send an email and the factors that influence your email deliverability. We’ll also consider several strategies and best practices for improvement.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
- Meaning of Email deliverability
- Factors that influence email deliverability
- Ways to improve email deliverability
- Email deliverability best practices
Let's dive in
What is Email Deliverability?
Email deliverability measures how successful your marketing emails are in your recipients' inbox folder. Email deliverability is often measured as the percentage of emails accepted by the internet service provider (or ISP for short).
Email deliverability is important to email marketers as it is used to figure out whether or not their emails are reaching their customers, failure to reach customers reduces the performance of an email campaign.
Every time you send out an email to your customers, you always want it to land in their inbox, then hopefully they open it and take action desired actions.
This is the reason you are sending it in the first place, right?
But what if your message never got into their inbox?
This not only affects your reputation as a brand but it also looks bad to your ESP or mail service.
Factors that Affect email deliverability
1. Low sender score and reputation
Your Sender score measures your email sender reputation and how email service providers rate your email IP address. It measures the health of your email program.
A sender Score is a number between 0 and 100, with a lower sender reputation score it is less likely your email will reach an active subscribers inbox.
Other types of sender's reputation important to email deliverability are domain reputation and IP reputation, which are tied to the domain you are sending from, and the IP addresses you use to send from respectively.
2. High bounce rates
Email bounce is caused when you sent a message to an invalid email address, it can't be delivered because the email has nowhere to be delivered.
When you experience email bounce, it simply means that you are sending emails to people who don't know you or you are not properly managing your email list.
3. Spammy email content
Most email Spam filters use algorithms to identify words or phrases that spammers use and look out for bad headers that violate email providers' policies. T
And these filters are damn effective, that's why your Gmail spam folder as an instance is probably filled with spam mails
The chance of triggering a spam filter is always higher for new recipients, so you need to be extra careful with spam-triggering phrases like "discount," "% off," or "free" when sending to new email recipients on your list.
On top of going straight to the spam folder, this can risk harming your sender's reputation if people report your email or delete it without opening it.
Other factors include
4. Recipient actions: if your recipient either deletes your email without or moves it into the spam folder opening it
Ways to improve email deliverability
1. Consider a double opt-in confirmation process
To reduce your email bounce rate, you want to make sure all the emails on your list are real and active email addresses.
You can use various email verification tools, but your best bet is to have a double opt-in confirmation process, this means that when someone gives you their email address, they get an email asking them to confirm the email.
2. Clean your email list
If your email subscribers aren't engaging with your emails, it's best to remove them from your email list.
I know, you want to have as many subscribers as possible, but an unengaged subscriber can do you much more harm than good.
Do you need to completely delete those subscribers?
Maybe not, this leads us to the next point.
3. Segment your email list
Segmenting your audience can help improve email deliverability by increasing your chances of sending relevant and personalized content to subscribers, making them more likely to open your emails and engage with your email.
Engage as a platform allows you to create different customer segments based on different customer data (customer attributes and events).
4. Optimize your email content
The content of your email has a huge role to play in whether or not your emails reach your customers' inboxes or not, so spending time on your email design will improve email deliverability.
Here’s how you can do that:
- Optimize your headline
- Carefully craft your email body
- Ensure a Mobile-friendly email design
Final thoughts on how to improve email deliverability and avoid spam
Email marketing with its high return on investment can be tough due to high competition and email saturation.
Email service providers and anti-spam organizations have strict policies against spammers, so always ensure your emails land in your subscriber’s inbox.
Your email deliverability reputation decides whether your emails reach your customer’s inbox or spam folder. You can achieve a good inbox placement by:
- Keeping your email list clean
- Removing inactive customers
- Optimizing your email content
- Segment your list
With the Engage, you can track how customers interact with your product or service, and create unique customer segments or groups. You can then use that data to send personalized messages to your customer via Email, SMS, Push Notifications and In-App messages.