Email marketing is right in the center of the hotspot today. In the broadest sense, every email that reaches a potential client is considered marketing via email. Because you have chosen to click on this blog, we believe that you already know about it – but to brief you, email deliverability is the metric scale that is defined by your true potential to get your marketing emails successfully in your customer’s inbox.
Attracting opt-in subscribers can do wonders for your email deliverability. Make your emails reach your potential customer with quality content. Develop a high sender reputation with IP warming, custom domain, sender id, and proper domain authentication. Avoid domain being blacklisted by spam traps.
Your strategy here plays a key role in your email campaigns. Opens, clicks, bounces, unsubscribes, and spam reports – identifying the trends in every metric is essential when it comes to your campaign. We will be discussing nine tested full-proof tips to improve your email delivery.
TABLE OF CONTENT
We’ve short-listed the most effective ways to boost your email deliverability. Remember! Your emails are useless if they do not reach your potential customer. The smartest and most efficient ways are sometimes right in front of you, you just never notice them. Let us get back to the basics and remind you how growth is always rooted at the foundation of your email trends.
1/ Custom Sending Domain
An email address with a custom domain helps you create a professional image for your brand. Moreover, it boosts your business’ credibility. Consumers look for an email and a website domain name to match. Neglecting to keep up with this gives rise to unnecessary questions. Can the business be trusted? are they too tight-fisted to obtain a domain email? are they just too lazy? You cannot risk the credibility of your brand. Having a proper website on your email-sending domain gives off a great first impression and regardless of what you might believe, the first impression does matter.
Having an active website reduces the chances of your emails being flagged by spam filters. It also helps in improving business communication confidentiality. Using generic domains often leads to your emails ending up in the spam folder. Hence, it is relevant that you invest in a proper website domain before you jump-start your email campaigns.
2/ Use Subdomains
A subdomain is a supplementary piece of your root domain. It is that part of your domain that is added as a prefix to your main domain. For instance, grow@example.growthchime.com. Here, “example” is the subdomain. Although a subdomain is known to be linked to your root domain, it has a distinct identity of its own.
The key element here is maintaining a high sender reputation. The known email service providers, namely, Google, Yahoo, etc have been wired to keep tabs on your domains and associate a sender reputation with them. When your sender reputation is low, you are highly likely to encounter email deliverability issues. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Email Service Providers (ESPs) may naturally start rejecting the bulk quantity of your emails because your domain does not meet their basic reputation standards.
However, the good news is that it is much easier to manage your email reputation if you are using a subdomain when sending out marketing emails. When your subdomain gets a bad reputation, you are at the liberty of switching to a new one while still being linked to your root domain. This method has known to ensure the protection of your root domain from reputation problems. On the other hand, your customers will keep receiving emails from a domain they trust.
3/ Proper Domain Authentication
Email domain authentication is the process of verifying the sending origin or domain of an email—in essence, proving to ESPs that your emails are truly coming from you and not from a spam origin. A significant emphasis is being shed on the fact that your emails landing in the spam folder could drastically reduce your open rates and other engagement metrics, damage your sender reputation—ultimately causing future deliverability problems—and could even cause your recipients to develop a poor image about your brand.
By authenticating your email sending domain, you can maintain a strong sender reputation and avoid the common disaster of ’email spoofing’, a tactic used in spam and phishing attacks that comprises a third-party taking charge of your email domain and deceitfully sending emails on your behalf. Therefore, avoiding your campaigns from ending up in the spam folders to crucial to the success of your email deliverability rates — and domain authentication is one of the most powerful ways to help you get the work done.
4/ IP Address Warming
Another key element to building a good sender reputation is via IP warming. For starters, gradually increasing the volume of emails sent from a new dedicated IP address on a predetermined schedule is called IP warming. For example, some campaigners set their predetermined schedule to achieve a monthly email sending goal.
By warming up your IP address, both ISPs and ESPs can thoroughly assess your subject matter. Your content and your IP address will be judged as to whether they are secure, have high engagement, and subsequently, analyze your sending behavior. Now, since your email sending IP address is trusted, more of your emails reach your recipients’ inboxes without being blocked, bounced, ignored, or filtered into a user’s email spam box. When you have successfully done IP warming and built a sender’s reputation, your business email and IP address will be trusted by ISPs and ESPs, thus improving your email deliverability rate.
5/ Sender Reputation
We have been raving about the sender’s reputation up until now. Email sender reputation is a combination of IP and Domain reputation, and it may be called the ultimate key to the success of your email marketing campaigns.
Spam complaints, spam traps, soft and hard bounces, unsubscribes, engagement rates, and more factors can easily lead to the downfall of your sender’s reputation. If a lot of people opted out (via unsubscribes or, worse, spam reports) or did not care to even open your emails, your reputation will be low. If you, however, have a healthy, engaged list that you developed organically, the odds of having your emails delivered are high.
While IP warming and domain authentication remain on top of our list, there are other methods to improve your sender reputation as well. Relying on double opt-in, i.e., asking each subscriber to confirm their subscription is always a clever idea. The only way to have an organically healthy list is to have people who really want to be on it. While some ESPs will automatically remove hard bounces right away, all the other bounces – you need to take care of them on your own. It is always the factors that seem insignificant that might hit your sender reputation.
6/ Increase Opt-In Subscribers
We’ve talked about this in our sender reputation point, but we did not give you a ‘how’! So, how can you increase your opt-in subscribers? This is where website pop-ups and re-engagements come into play. Implement pop-ups on the pages where people presumably end up, such as your homepage and your most popular blog post pages. Pop-ups are a good, organic way to get more subscribers via opt-in.
Re-engaging cold prospects serves two purposes: one, it can reignite the relationship and spark more engagement moving forward. Two, it helps you remain compliant and avoid wasting time by emailing people who are not interested in what you are selling. If you are looking to increase your opt-in subscribers on a large scale, then you can also market at conferences and tradeshows. Lastly, you can also include a check box for people to opt-in to your email marketing when they are engaging with other content on your site.
7/ Consistency
Email marketing is not a one-time rodeo, it is a long-time process. Having a consistent schedule on your calendar is of utmost importance when it comes to your campaign. Being consistent shows your willingness to commit to your own brand. Your potential prospects will not agree with your ideologies at once, it takes time, and consistency is the key. If a customer or prospect does not understand the benefits of what you are selling, they are unlikely to invest or buy from you.
Consistent email plans save both time and money. It boosts sales and enhances the customer-buyer relationship. A brand needs to build trust in the minds of its potential customer before it can get promising leads, being consistent always works. Thus, having a fixed schedule for your email marketing may show a promising rise in your email deliverability metrics.
8/ Quality & Relevant Content
Your emails will not reap much unless you are sending out quality content. Your content needs to have substance and preciseness, with a little touch of your own brand. Remember, customization might just be the key you are looking for. Secondly, your content needs to be synced to your recipient’s needs. Your opt-in subscriber will stay if you give them a reason to. Knowing your audience and producing their preferred choice of content can jump-start your metrics for email deliverability.
Behavioral analytics lets you better understand how many people are interacting with your site. Besides that, you can learn which pages bring them to the site in the initial phase, and which pages they connect with the most. Understanding analytics can help you produce content that your audience will like.
9/ Avoid Blacklists & SPAM Traps
As mentioned already, being blacklisted by spam traps can have a lasting impact on your email deliverability. Periodic removal of inactive subscribers is always preferred. Your next preference should be strictly sticking to the organic growth of your list. Moreover, using programs like web crawlers and email scraping tools is a surefire way to gather honeypot emails and get yourself blacklisted. Lastly, we suggest you clean your lists using email verification tools.
Wrap Up
Email deliverability is the prime metric you need to consider to analyze the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
We hope our short-listed ways help you market your brand in the most organic and innovative way.
So, what all pointers do you plan to implement out of this?
FAQs
- When is the best time to send an email?
The best time to send an email is simply when your contacts want to receive it. Some contacts want a daily, weekly, or monthly email. Other contacts only want to hear from you when you have a discount/offer ongoing. Analysis and consistency come into play here. - How often should I clean out my email list?
One of the main causes of deliverability issues is poor list hygiene. You should review and clean out your email lists often. We recommend a scheduled clearing out of your email list at least twice a year. - Why you shouldn’t email your complete list at once?
One of the key strategies of a successful email campaign is segmentation. We recommend you design each message with a target audience in mind and send it just to that audience. This will also increase the engagement of the subscriber with your content. - What is an acceptable email deliverability rate by industry?
100% deliverability is considered nearly impossible as user mailboxes change often, or people simply leave. An email deliverability rate of 90% or higher, sidelines a successful marketing campaign. - How will changing my IP address affect my deliverability?
A change of IP address can help you to grow your domain reputation to some extent, but not enough to overcome other negative sending habits, like bad content and low engagement.