Five tips (alphabetically):
- Apply best practices: avoid trigger words in your subject lines and email content, and always include a clear call-to-action.
- Comply with anti-spam laws: CAN-SPAM Act in the United States, Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and Australia’s Spam Act, among others.
- Maintain list hygiene: regularly remove inactive and invalid email addresses from your list, as well as ensuring that you are only emailing people who have given you permission to do so.
- Perform ongoing monitoring: monitor email engagement metrics.
- Utilize authentication protocols: examples of email authentication protocols include SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) — among others.
Overview
Email marketing is a powerful tool for businesses to communicate with their customers and prospects. However, the success of an email marketing campaign depends on more than just the content and design of the emails. One critical factor that can greatly impact the effectiveness of an email marketing campaign is email deliverability.
Email deliverability, in essence, refers to the ability of an email to successfully reach its intended recipient’s inbox. Poor email deliverability can result in emails being blocked by ISPs, leading to a lower open rate and a reduced ROI for the campaign.
To ensure high email deliverability rates, email marketers must implement best practices in their email campaigns. This includes ensuring the use of proper authentication protocols, to manage the email lists effectively, and monitor email engagement metrics, all while complying with anti-spam laws — not just domestic but also of other countries if your recipient list includes addresses from those locations.
What is email deliverability?
Email deliverability refers to the ability of an email to successfully reach the inbox of its intended recipient. This is influenced by several factors, including the content of the email, the sender’s reputation, and more. In essence, email deliverability is a measure of how successful an email campaign is at delivering emails to the inbox, as opposed to being filtered into spam or junk folders, bounced back, or blocked entirely.
Why is it important to include this in your email campaign efforts?
Email deliverability is critical to the success of your email campaign efforts. If your emails are not getting delivered to your recipients’ inboxes, your campaign will not be effective, no matter how great your content is. When your emails are delivered to the inbox, recipients are more likely to open and engage with them. This can lead to better click-through rates, conversions, and ultimately, more revenue for your business. If your emails are consistently filtered into spam or junk folders, it can damage your brand reputation and make it harder to reach your target audience in the future.
When should you think about email deliverability?
You should think about email deliverability from the very beginning of your email campaign planning process. In fact, email deliverability should be a key consideration at every stage of the campaign, from planning to execution to analysis. By optimizing your list acquisition, email content, sending practices, and monitoring and analysis, you can maximize your email deliverability rate and ensure the success of your email campaign efforts.
When you are building your email list, it’s important to ensure that you are collecting email addresses from people who have given you permission to email them. This can help you avoid issues with spam complaints and unsubscribes that can negatively impact your sender reputation and deliverability. Also, the content of your emails can impact deliverability, so it’s important to avoid certain trigger words in your subject lines and email content, and to always include a clear call-to-action, while using a reputable sender name and email address.
How can you use email deliverability to improve your campaign performance?
One of the most important steps you can take to improve your email deliverability is to monitor your deliverability rate. This will help you identify any issues that may be negatively impacting your deliverability and take corrective action as needed. Maintaining a clean email list is critical to ensuring good deliverability, which can be achieved by regularly removing inactive and invalid email addresses from your list, as well as ensuring that you are only emailing people who have given you permission to do so.
Your choice of ESP (email service provider) can impact your deliverability rate as well, so it’s important to choose a reputable provider with a good track record of email deliverability, making sure that they implement email authentication, which helps you verify that your emails are coming from a trusted source, which can improve your deliverability rate. Some examples of email authentication protocols include SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
How can you improve your email deliverability?
Improving your email deliverability requires a combination of best practices and ongoing monitoring. Always maintain a clean email list, by removing invalid and inactive email addresses regularly to make sure your email list is up-to-date and accurate. This will help you reduce the number of complaints and bouncebacks, which can negatively impact your email deliverability.
Also, implement authentication protocols to verify your email sender identity and improve your email deliverability, and use an email monitoring tool to track your email metrics and identify any issues that may be negatively impacting your efforts.
Always respect subscriber preferences: honor subscriber preferences regarding email frequency, content, and format. Giving subscribers control over the emails they receive can help you reduce unsubscribe rates and spam complaints which can, in return, improve your email deliverability.
Conclusion
In conclusion, email deliverability is a critical aspect of any successful email marketing campaign. It is essential for businesses to ensure that their emails are delivered to their intended recipients’ inboxes and not being blocked by spam filters or sent to spam folders. This can be achieved through implementing best practices in email marketing, such as complying with anti-spam laws, using authentication protocols, managing email lists effectively, and monitoring engagement metrics.
