Are you craving for high open rates? If not, then you should. Because high open rates get you more traffic, leads, and eventually, sales. But hold on, to improve the open rates, your audience must first receive your emails. But as per a Sendgrid’s report:
21% of the emails never get delivered to the user’s inbox.
But what if your emails are not even landing on your audience’s inbox? Your campaigns, money, and time will be wasted. So to rectify the things, you need to use some best practices while sending emails to your subscribers.
And in this article, I’m going to tell you about some email deliverability tips and best practices you should start following in order to deliver your mails successfully and improve your open rates.
But let’s first get a clear understanding about email deliverability.
What Is Email Deliverability?
Email deliverability is the number of emails your audience has successfully received, commonly expressed as a percentage.
Why Email Deliverability Is Important?
To determine the importance of email deliverability, I want to show you some stats regarding emails.
Source: Creativestudioweb
- The average return for Email marketing service is 44x more for every 1$ spent(CampaignMonitor)
- 66% of customers say that emails persuade them better to make a purchase as compared to Facebook(20%), and Twitter(6%).(DigitalCurrent)
- Emails are 40 times more effective in customer acquisition than social media.(McKinsey)
As you see, email marketing works better and generates more revenue than other social channels. But you can’t achieve these figures if your audience doesn’t get your mails or receive them in their spam folder.
Hence the email deliverability is crucial because if your email deliverability rate is not good enough, your emails won’t reach your audience and you’ll fall short on getting high open, click through, conversion rates, and eventually sales. Apart from this, a good email deliverability rate also improves your email reputation.
What Is A Good Email Deliverability Rate?
Well this is something hard to define. But as per a campaign monitor research, the average bounce rate of emails for retail and marketing industry was 0.69% and 1.29% respectively.
This shows that if almost 2% of your emails are bouncing, it’s fine. Hence, your email deliverability rate should be above 98%.but if the bounce rate is touching 5 or 10%, it’s something you should worry about.
So the question comes, what are the things that impact your email bounce and deliverability rate
Things That Affect Email Deliverability
Here are a few things that can have a positive or negative impact on your email deliverability.
- Email Reputation : Email reputation is a major factor that impacts your email deliverability. However, email reputation also depends on some factors like your email frequency and volume, clean email list, spam complaints and traps, getting blacklisted, etc.
- Email Authentication: Email authentication also affects your email deliverability. You can use email authentication techniques like SPF, DKIM and TLS to authenticate and encrypt your emails.
- Email Infrastructure: Email infrastructure includes factors like IP addresses (Dedicated IP and Shared IP), feedback loops, etc.
- Email Content: Content also plays a vital role in affecting your email deliverability. You should take care of the content relevancy, design, optimization, spammyness, etc. while building your emails.
7 Tips To Improve Email Deliverability
1. Check On Your Sender Reputation
As the name suggests, sender reputation is a factor that determines the reputation of an email sender. It is calculated by using some parameters such as your domain reputation and your email host reputation. If your sender reputation is low, it’s more likely that your emails will land in the spam folder of the users.
So you need to increase your email reputation in order to hit the users’ inbox. But to increase email reputation, first you need to check your IP and domain reputation.
There are a few tools you can use to check your sender reputation. One of them is Talos Intelligence reputation lookup tool. You just need to fetch your email host IP address and paste it on the box. You’ll get a report that displays the Sender Reputation.
If it’s bad you should focus on improving it. And how can you do that? The next point will show you.
2. Target The Most Engaged Audience
One thing that improves your sender reputation is the engagement on your emails. The more users open, read, and click on your emails, the better your sender reputation will be. So the question comes, how can you increase the engagement on your emails?
The answer is, by targeting specific audience groups. What you can do is to target those users who’ve already engaged with your brand several times before. For this you need your email marketing tool and create a segment for frequent buyers, or those users who’ve purchased something from you twice or thrice before.
Once you divide users into specific segments, write personalized copies then send it to those users. If the users connect with your emails, they’ll open them, read them and give you more engagement.
3. Beware Of Spam Trap Emails
Spam trap emails are used by ISPs and blacklist providers to find out the people who don’t manage their email lists well. To avoid this issue, you should filter your email list and remove the inactive email addresses from it. You can use an email validation tool to remove such contacts from your list accurately. Otherwise, this can result in getting you blacklisted, or permanently blocking your emails and domain, or hurting your sender reputation.
4. Employ Double Opt-in Method
Double opt in or confirmed opt in is a method where the sender validates the user’s subscription by sending a confirmation email. However, it still not be used at a mass level and the single opt in method is still used more where a brand starts sending you emails right away without any validation after you sign in to their newsletter.
This results in a high amount of spam complaints that is definitely not a good thing for your reputation.
5. Craft Non-spammy Subject Lines
69% of users report emails as spam because of their subject line.
Writing spammy subject lines increases the chances that your mails will be delivered to the spam folder. So take care while writing subject lines for your emails. Make sure you avoid using spam words like FREE, ORDER NOW, PURCHASE, ONLY, etc.
Also avoid adding FWD: or RE: in your email subject lines. Try to make them persuasive like ‘Here’s a quick guide on improving conversions from your emails’.
6. Do Not Use URL Shorteners
You know who uses URL shorteners in emails? Spammers. Yeah, and if you want to be one of them, use them. Gmail blocs most of the URL shorteners in bulk emailing. Hence using them in your email marketing service is a waste.
Apart from this, when you mask a link, it also hides the details about its destination which holds the readers back to click on it. And this results in less open rates.
7. Build A Trustworthy IP
A trustworthy and valid IP is that which is not considered as spam by the ISP filters. And how do these filters add an IP into the spamming list? Simple, by analyzing the spammy keywords, content, and subject lines.
If you send emails that contain spammy keywords or content, ISPs will block your emails which hurts your IP. So to build a valid IP, you can send a small bunch of emails to your engaged email addresses. If those emails perform well, get good open and click through rates, you can start increasing the number of emails and send them to others.
Best Tools To Check Email Deliverability
To improve email deliverability, you need to perform an email deliverability check. And there’s a few email deliverability tools that help you do that. Let’s look at them
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Mxtoolbox
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Mxtoolbox is a great email deliverability tester. This tool generates different reports for your domain. You can check the blacklist report, DNS Lookup, Domain Health, etc.
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Mail-Tester
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You can use Mail-Tester to check the spammyness of your emails. If you’ve created an email to send it in bulk to your audience under your email campaign, it’s better to perform an email deliverability check to see if it contains anything spammy or not.
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Glockapps
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Glockapps is one of the finest email deliverability tools to check your IP reputation, detect phishing and spoofing, improve email deliverability, etc. Using this can improve the open rates of your emails.
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Isnotspam
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Isnotspam is similar to Mail-Tester. You can use it to check whether your emails are spam or not. This’ll help you perk up your email marketing service and deliver more mails.
Conclusion
If you want high open rates and better conversions from your emails, first make sure your email deliverability rates are good enough. Getting spammed will hurt your sender and email reputation, and degrade your credibility in the market.
Use all the above mentioned best practices to improve email deliverability rates, increase email reputation, and make your email marketing service great. If you’ve faced any kind of issues regarding the topic, tell us in the comments.