Is your email deliverability rate making you want to bang your head against a wall? Frustrating isn’t it?
After all, you likely spent a decent chunk of time crafting the perfect email to send to your subscribers, only to find out a large percentage didn’t even receive it!
To ensure that your emails get read, it’s important to understand the best email deliverability practices.
Several elements and practices define good email marketing campaigns, and your email deliverability rate is one of them.
Today, I’ll take you through the different aspects of email deliverability, such as:
- Is there an average email deliverability rate?
- What is a good deliverability rate?
- How to evaluate test email for deliverability?
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Understanding the concept of email deliverability
Ever find all your emails land in the receiver’s spam?
This makes it challenging for your business to reach the right audience and generate leads.
Therefore, it’s important to analyze and run tests and concentrate on email deliverability before you send an email to your audience.
Email deliverability evaluates the frequency of an email reaching the subscriber’s inbox. This process is occasionally termed inbox placement.
The ultimate goal of any company is to gain metrics on whether the email has landed successfully in the inbox and how frequently it is opened.
Several factors influence your mail’s landing in the inbox or the spam folder, and they are:
- IP address reputation
- Sender reputation
- DNS records
- SPF records
Your email-marketing process has a big effect on whether the email will land in the inbox or the spam folder.
Email deliverability is an actual rate that highlights whether the email made it to the subscriber’s inbox or not. You are bound to experience a poor email deliverability rate when your emails consistently land in the spam folder or when your email address is blocked.
Common email deliverability mistakes to avoid
In addition to the factors mentioned above, there are a few other factors that impact email deliverability, and they are:
- Bad list quality
- Low engagement
- Missing email authentication
If you aim to improve your email deliverability rate, determine what’s wrong or missing. You could have missed a single or a combination of elements shared above.
Search for authentication methods such as DKIM, SPF, and others to improve your email deliverability rate. You can implement a DMARC record setup to enable email authentication measures and protect your domain.
Simultaneously, it is important to prioritize user engagement through the content of your emails. Remember, an email engagement rate is a mix of click and open rates that indicate positive engagement signals.
One of the primary causes of poor deliverability problems is bad email list quality. For instance, a couple of inbox providers facilitate the additional services of domain blocklist lookup, where they spam your emails if you fall under the email blocklist.
Other metrics such as the sender score can have an effect on your deliverability. Sender score considers your IP reputation and domain reputation.
The difference between email delivery and email deliverability
Before sending an email campaign it is important to ask the following questions:
- Is your message acceptable?
- Is the message getting delivered to the inbox?
Understanding email delivery
Email delivery revolves around the probability that a receiver will accept your email before the spam folder or inbox. If your email does not end up in the inbox, the delivery is less likely to be successful.
For instance, you have booked a flight ticket, reached the airport, boarded the right flight, and got to your destination.
Similarly, when you deliver the email correctly, it will land in the receiver’s inbox; they’ll learn about you and hopefully buy one of your products.
Understanding email deliverability
Is the message getting delivered to the inbox?
Your concentration is on the inbox placement; this means you have to be mindful of where your email gets delivered. Email deliverability in the spam folder, inbox, and other folders has different impacts.
Good deliverability comprises three essential elements:
Identification: This describes the primary protocols that confirm you are a reliable authority and all you quote in the email. Some protocols are shared via SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and others.
These protocols act as a security checkpoint for your organization that helps clear your email deliverability.
Reputation: Your sender’s reputation represents your email’s trustworthiness. Each ISP and firm have different scores for you, and curating positive behavior can help you craft a good reputation.
Content: Do you share relevant messages with your target audience? Poor copy with unorganized formatting can repel readers.
Using abrupt and unclear formatting can harm your email’s deliverability. Instead, consider what your audience is searching for and quote email messages accordingly.
The identification and reputation efforts lead the email to either inbox or the spam folder. On the contrary, if you have delivery issues, you need changes in the infrastructure. It’s time to review and work on the email addresses on the list.
However, if you notice deliverability issues, your subscribers are not interested in your content, or your practices are outdated.
Regardless of where you stand today, there is a scope to improve email deliverability.
Email deliverability best practices for 2022
This image will give you an idea about blacklist emails. If your email is on the blacklist then it will show in this list. Email service providers used to check the email blacklist to check whether your email will go into an Inbox or spam.
Personalize your emails
Subscribers and marketers have different descriptions of spam emails. For example, subscribers prioritize relevance over algorithms or spam filters.
Are you sharing content that your audience is interested in?
Analyze your content relevance and errors before you hit the send button on your email.
Of all the marketing tactics, email is the most personal channel, and hence your content must resonate with your audience. So, naturally, this directly impacts your deliverability and reader engagement.
Informative and engaging emails can lead to long-lasting relationships with your audience.
Clear opt-in process
The way you accumulate email addresses plays a vital role in your deliverability rates. An optimized opt-in procedure is more effective and affirms that the list comprises handpicked engaging users.
When you tap the wrong audience, they are likely to mark you as spam, and the ISPs consider that you are spamming others on your list.
To avoid such circumstances, I recommend the use of a double opt-in strategy that involves dual verification for the user. This verification process ensures that you have an engaged email list and target them only. Make sure to clean the list regularly to avoid spamming boxes unknowingly.
Analyze subscriber’s expectations
It is essential to consider reader expectations to improve email deliverability. The best way to do this is to inform your readers what they are getting into through transparent communication.
This way, you can align with them and obtain better outcomes.
A few businesses and marketers prefer easy ways to expand email databases, but they seldom drive results and may hamper your sender’s reputation.
One of the key reasons for this could be that they were not ready for regular messages and end up ignoring them, marking them as spam, or unsubscribing.
ISPs can track this poor engagement and degrade your sender reputation, which gradually affects your deliverability rate.
Instead, ask readers for their consent before shooting them a series of emails and playing with your engagement.
Track your metrics
Whether the result is good or bad, it is important to keep tabs on your reader’s activity and not flood their inbox with unwanted emails.
How do you understand whether your subscribers are engaged and enjoy associating with you?
Open and click-through rates coupled with spam complaints and unsubscribes can notify you of the effect of your audiences’ preferences.
Besides, high bounce rates, negative engagement, and compliant rates are bad indicators of email campaigns. You can use email deliverability tools and hire digital experts to strategize an effective campaign for your brand.
This combination can assist you in improving your sender score and eventually reaching the desired benchmark.
Key takeaways
Hosting good email lists, updating your content regularly, and sending effective marketing emails are crucial to email deliverability. This will help increase the likelihood of having your emails delivered to your recipient’s inbox.
Managing email deliverability helps to a solid foundation for your company’s future success.
Guest Author: Bharat Patel heads the digital marketing team at Brainvire Infotech. He is armed with over 12
years of experience in the fields of online marketing and project management. He is extremely
proactive in implementing the latest technological innovations in his projects. Bharat’s core
expertise lies in search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, and conversion rate
optimization, among other things. His immense flare of writing encourages him to consistently
pen down words revolving around current trends and innovations that relate to his fields of
interest.
