The world has transitioned to a more digital-centric approach. Therefore, most businesses have also gone online. The era of traditional brick-and-mortar enterprises is over. We now see the boom of digital marketing. Companies unable to change their way of life will eventually fail in the business sector.
The number of individuals using the internet has recently topped 5 billion. If we continue to push harder, this number will continue to rise.
The fusion of hyper-digitalization and technology has created numerous new possibilities for businesses. The way businesses approach marketing and selling has completely changed. All types of businesses (smaller setups or multinational companies) aim to boost their sales.
Now that all businesses have a platform to market their goods or services instantly. With digitalization, they can compete with millions of prospective clients with ease. This helps to carry out business processes while boosting competitiveness.
Email marketing has always played a crucial role in promoting business. It is a cost-effective, reliable, and measurable way of connecting with prospects. Email marketing offers the best (ROI) Return on Investment for marketing channels. However, when carried out efficiently, email marketing can help businesses succeed. Check the latest email marketing statistics.
Sending emails from your company to your audience’s inbox is crucial if you’re serious about success. This is where email deliverability comes into action.
If you are running a business and require crucial information about email deliverability, keep reading!
What Is Email Deliverability?
Email deliverability refers to the ability to reach the recipient’s inbox. Sender credibility, recipient engagement, and content are some factors that affect deliverability. Businesses can comprehend and improve the factors mentioned above. It will lead to more chances of recipients opening and reading received emails. Sometimes, email receivers tag messages as spam or blocked. It is due to poor deliverability that costs businesses chances to connect with clients or subscribers.
Numerous factors affect email authentication. But the most common ones are email content, the sender’s reputation, email addresses, and security protocols.
Businesses must concentrate on developing a high-quality email list of subscribers. Make sure to include users who have agreed to receive their emails. Use a sender name and email address that are recognizable to the brand. It leads to easy segmentation of emails to send tailored messages to the subscribers. Moreover, content optimization and result analysis will help you improve email deliverability.
Email Deliverability vs. Email Delivery
Let’s first define email deliverability before moving on to measures to increase it. Simply, it measures how well your marketing emails perform when users receive them. It is also known as inbox deliverability.
Email Deliverability vs. Email Delivery
It’s crucial to differentiate the two names as they’re sometimes mistaken to mean the same thing. Email delivery refers to whether the recipient’s mailbox accepts the email file, regardless of the folder. Email deliverability refers to the placement of the email.
It measures if the delivered file went to the inbox, spam, social, updates, or another folder. It checks if the emails have landed in folders that the receiver does not check frequently. Email deliverability is the capacity to get emails to the recipient’s mailbox.
Why Is Email Deliverability Important?
Did a user lose her password? Send her a message with a reset link. Is this a new feature? Send the excellent news to the subscribers’ mailboxes. Why is blog traffic less frequent than usual? Give your mailing list a collection of the newest articles. Every day, businesses send emails.
79.6% of authentic emails reach their intended recipient. It indicates that, on average, every three out of every twenty people:
- Won’t know about the brand-new feature you’ve been working on for months
- May switch to competitors offering the same feature or even a less practical choice.
- Won’t be able to access their account immediately and may leave your platform.
- Won’t know of your presence, therefore, will not purchase one of your paid plans.
Everyone will envy you if you are not anxious. However, most content experts will try to increase their delivery by even a tiny percentage.
13 Ways to Improve Email Deliverability
No matter how well-planned your email marketing strategy is, it will fail. Therefore, we have created an extensive list of email deliverability tips to help your email campaigns.
Get Your Email Account Ready
Warming up your account is crucial to avoid scams. That is why businesses stress warming accounts in the email outreach process. The main concern is to be authentic and human in your email.
Warming up your account before using an email automation tool is crucial. Start by personalizing your email account with a profile photo and email signature. Moreover, use this email address to register for accounts on social media and other websites and subscribe to a few mailing lists.
Don’t send emails to strangers in a hurry. Write to colleagues or friends and request a response from them. React to their comments. Ensure your emails don’t all look the same and don’t contain spammy language.
Warming up emails manually takes a lot of time. Use the best email warm-up tools to handle everything for you to automate it.
Send Emails to Users When They Request Them
Purchasing mailing lists is a bad idea. However, you also shouldn’t send people messages unless they agree.
Not everyone is keen to know about the launch of your new product. Just because the recipients attended an event a few years back or registered on your forums does not mean they want to stay up-to-date.
If not, they will likely flag your communication as spam to remove it from their inbox. Regardless of the web server you use, only a handful of these requests may harm your domain’s reputation. Moreover, it will lead to bans from participating in the following campaigns. Avoid connecting with irrelevant accounts that may be uninterested in what you’ve got to say.
Never Buy Email Addresses
It’s a horrible idea to buy email lists. Individuals on purchased lists have a higher tendency to flag your messages as spam and harm your reputation. Up to 20% of problems with email delivery are due to spam complaints. Moreover, bought lists have a lot of spam traps.
Moreover, the engagement rate is low because these consumers are simply uninterested in your offering. There are many more effective ways to spend your money.
Provide Details About Email Content
The email content has a significant impact on email deliverability. Based on the subject line alone, 69% of emails are classified as spam. Make sure your headline doesn’t contain any spammy words or does not include words in CAPS.
Regarding the email content, aim to keep the text-to-image ratio at 60:40. Avoid including too many links and spam trigger words.
Maintain a Regular Routine
Users and ISPs support businesses that send emails on a regular timetable. When emails arrive on a regular schedule, such as every Tuesday afternoon, users open and engage with them.
The email server can be suspicious if you typically send one email each week but suddenly start sending three. Avoid the need to inform everyone about a new product immediately. Instead, include a statement in your current campaigns.
The two main benefits of sending emails at appropriate times are:
- Increasing conversion
- Enhancing your reputation
Tuesday from 10 to 11 AM seems like an excellent time to send an email.
You can send emails using various email deliverability tools at a particular time in the recipient’s time zone. It will be necessary if your mailing list includes users from many time zones.
Maintain Low Bounce Rates
An email bounces when it cannot reach an email address. A hard bounce is a persistent mistake, meaning the email is forever invalid. You should instantly remove hard-bounce emails from your list.
Soft bounces are temporary mistakes. You can save some of these and add them again to your campaign. However, don’t quickly resend to soft bounces. Wait a day or two until the overflowing mailboxes are cleaned out and the broken servers are fixed.
You should treat a soft bounce that occurs too frequently as a hard bounce and remove the email from your active list.
Configure Your Tracking Domain
You send emails with their specific domain if you use the best email automation solutions. Having your custom domain but continuing to send emails from a different one will cause Google to be suspicious.
Email automation programs frequently group their users across similar domains. But, if you have a spammer in your organization, their dishonest behavior may hurt your deliverability. It is because your activities are similar to spam. You should track your outreach everytime.
Create a custom tracking domain and configure it. It will create links in your emails rather than the default generic domain used by email automation software.
Related article: Best Email Tracking Software and Tools for Gmail
Avoid Blocklists and Spam Traps
Spam traps are fictitious email addresses that ISPs create and post in various places online. These addresses are frequently added to bots’ collections while gathering emails. It is because they closely resemble the real accounts the bots are after.
Sending even one email to a spam address will immediately hurt your deliverability. The various algorithms add spammers and those making such stupid errors to numerous deny lists.
Email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, or others verify the sent messages before they land in the users’ inboxes. They reject it if there is sufficient evidence to believe the sender is a spammer.
Eliminate Inactive Users and Role Accounts
If a recipient doesn’t open a single email, you send them over a few months or a year. If they still do not open the received emails, this tells you that they are not fond of receiving such emails. Moreover, another reason could be an inactive email address.
Choosing a reasonable time frame will have two significant benefits:
- increase email engagement
- eliminate inactive contacts from your lists
Authenticate Your Email
Email authentication enhances email delivery and establishes the legitimacy of emails. It creates mechanisms that validate the sender domain’s authenticity.
SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are essential protocols for establishing your identity. They act as gatekeepers, determining your identity and if you are an authorized sender.
- A DNS record known as the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) tells the service the permitted IP addresses to send from your domain.
- The DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) encrypts data to prevent identity theft.
- If everything fails, use the DMARC report to find a viable solution for email authentication. It limits exposure to damaging and false messages.
Rely on Double Opt-In
Setting up a double opt-in for each email campaign you intend to send is also a good idea. Usually, a user must visit their mailbox and confirm receiving your emails after subscribing to your list.
Introducing a primary feature does not impact deliverability. However, it affects the quality of your email list, spam reports, and bounce rate.
It is enticing to automatically add users to a mailing list when they sign up for a service or create an account. If you expressly request their permission, it will help you achieve more incredible long-term results. Also, it maintains you in compliance with the law.
Create Personalized Emails
People enjoy receiving personal attention. And it’s not only a matter of starting an email by addressing them or ending the message with a signature. Email personalization strategies show subscribers that the business is willing to meet their needs.
Related article: Deep Personalization Guide
Balancing the Text-to-Image Ratio
The deliverability of your emails may suffer if they contain too many photos. First, specific email clients cannot read emails with HTML or graphics. You won’t convert if the prospect can’t interpret your email.
Also, ISPs are doubtful of emails that contain only a single large image. Several businesses use image-text to avoid email spam filters. However, ISPs have learned about this.
7 Ways to Avoid Sending Spam Email
You might wonder why the emails are spam rather than in your inbox. The increased severity of spam filtering is one of the critical causes of this. Webmail companies consider the following two things to determine which emails should land in the inbox:
- your recipient behavior
- engagement levels
The following are seven methods to stop sending spam emails:
Avoid Responding to Spam
Spammers will attempt to sway us into responding to their offers or falling for a phishing scam. Sometimes hackers send harmful emails that infect our computers with viruses and malware.
- If you don’t pay a ransom, they will encrypt your files, and you may lose access. Most likely, you may have heard about the global ransomware attack.
- Even responding to spam sent by reputable businesses or marketers allows them to send you more.
Spammers can monitor whether you opened and interacted with the mail. However, if you do, they will continue to contact you. Avoid opening spam at all costs. Delete it permanently after sending it directly to your junk mail or spam folder.
Use a Trustworthy Email Deliverability Tool
Spammers typically check the IP addresses linked to the sender’s ID to determine evidence of any spam complaints. If so, genuine email addresses may be flagged based only on association.
Always choose a dependable email service to prevent this from happening to your emails. The best providers take measures to stop spammers from utilizing their services. It ensures that the emails you receive are free from harm by spammers’ illegal acts.
The top email deliverability tools help you avoid typical spam triggers. These may include a missing physical address or utilizing a sender email id that appears suspicious.
Avoid Subscribing to Mailing Lists
Refusing to join email lists is another strategy to stop spam mailings. Online forms, social media, or collecting information are to obtain email addresses. The fewer mailing lists you join, the less likely that spammers will discover your email address.
Never Send Emails Without Permission
Sending emails without authorization is the fastest way to mark them as spam. Consider your response when you receive mail from an anonymous person. You will flag the email as spam without ever opening it, assuming it avoids the spam filter of your email provider.
Long-term company success does not result from sending people promotional emails without consent. You need your subscribers to be interested in persuading them to purchase from you. Random email recipients are disinterested. That is why they may feel annoyed after receiving emails from a stranger. The golden rule is to always get consent before sending an email.
Employ a Temporary Email Address
Make a new email ID unrelated to your personal account for subscriptions. That way, you may quickly abandon it if it becomes compromised.
Having multiple email addresses is a popular choice. The Radicati Group estimated that in 2019, there were 1.75 email accounts per user, which rose to 1.86 in 2022.
Safeguard Email Address
You must set up a backup email address to receive the bulk of the spam. It helps you keep your personal email address private. Using an alternative email helps you in the following ways:
- You can hide it from social media websites. It is to protect your email information from scammers who use such platforms to gather personal information.
- Consider handwriting your email address if your job necessitates publicizing your contact information. Rose Smith at Google’s email service or “rosemith at gmail.com” are acceptable substitutions for the email id [email protected]. A human can understand this format, but an automatic program cannot tell it’s an actual email address.
Have A Clearly Visible Sender Address
The “From” field contains your sender address when someone views your email. Your email may be spam if the sender’s address contains strange characters or sounds suspicious.
Avoiding sender addresses that include digits or other strange characters is advisable. Keep to a single name or the name of your business. It helps you avoid spam. It is because it’s more personal than random characters. People associate automated emails with such email addresses. That is why it is crucial to have names in the email ids.
Conclusion
The deliverability of emails is essential for corporate success. Therefore, you must know the factors that affect email deliverability. These may include email authentication processes, reputation management, and content quality. That is why businesses stress email deliverability to ensure successful email campaigns.
You can use the tips mentioned above to improve the deliverability rates. Moreover, it will help you optimize subscriber engagement and accomplish your marketing objectives. For continued success, make sure to analyze and improve your email marketing. You should also follow the business trends and best practices for your email campaigns.