Email deliverability is an essential factor for any successful email marketing campaign. If you’re not reaching the right people with the right message, your efforts could be wasted.
Fortunately, there are many simple ways to improve email deliverability and ensure you’re getting the most out of your email campaigns. From optimizing your content to managing your contact list, these 10 best ways to improve email deliverability can help you get the most out of your email marketing efforts.
Whether you’re just starting out or looking for ways to take your campaigns to the next level, these tips can help you get the most out of your emails.
What Is Email Deliverability?
Email deliverability is the process of ensuring that emails sent to customers actually reach their inboxes. This process involves managing things like email authentication and sender reputations, as well as understanding the rules of various email providers.
It’s essential for any successful email marketing campaign, as it ensures that your emails reach the intended recipients. Every email sent goes through a number of steps before it lands in the inbox of the recipient. Email deliverability looks at each of these steps to make sure that the email gets to its destination.
This includes things like authentication, which is the process of verifying that the sender is who they say they are, and sender reputation, which is the measure of how trustworthy the sender is. It also includes understanding the rules of different email providers, as different providers have different criteria for delivering emails.
Email deliverability is an important aspect of any email marketing campaign, as it helps ensure that your emails reach their destination. With the right strategy, you can increase your email deliverability and get more of your emails into the inboxes of your customers.
Factors That Affect Email Deliverability
Email deliverability is an important factor to consider when sending out email campaigns. There are a few things you should take into account when it comes to ensuring your emails reach their intended recipients.
- First, make sure that your content is appropriate for the audience you’re targeting.
- Avoid words or phrases that could be flagged as spam, and make sure your subject lines are concise and relevant.
- You should also pay attention to your sender score, which is a measure of how reputable you are in the eyes of the email providers.
- Finally, be mindful of your sending frequency and make sure that you’re not sending too many emails in a short period of time.
If you follow these steps, you will be on your way to having an effective email campaign with high deliverability rates.
Tips For Improving Email Deliverability
Now that you know the basics about email deliverability, why don’t we just straight to exploring all the tips for improving email deliverability?
Let’s start with the most simple yet important one i.e.
1. Use A Professional Sender Email Address
No matter how big your business is or how many people you are sending your email to, make sure your sender email address looks professional – no personal emails or free accounts like Gmail, Yahoo, etc. should be used.
ISPs likewise will generally incline toward the individuals who send messages with authentic addresses. So, for sending emails to your audience you must have an email address related to your domain such as abc@yourdomain.com.
2. Authenticate Your Sender Email (Domain) Address
ISPs use a variety of email authentication techniques to ensure that the email originator is genuine. It’s fairly simple to pass them if you’re a legitimate email sender, so put some effort into it.
Make sure your sender email address is authenticated with SPF(Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) records in order to ensure that your emails are not marked as spam by the recipient’s email server.
3. Send Permission-Based Emails
Use double opt-in lists for sending emails, ensure that your recipients must have opted-in to receive your emails by using double opt-in subscription forms on your website and in emails.
If people don’t remember opting in or signing up for your mailing list, they may mark your emails as spam and you may end up getting your domain blacklisted. If it is, you may need to take steps to improve it.
Consequently, your domain, when flagged as a source of spam will decline your sender reputation and low deliverability rates in the long run.
4. Segment Your Lists
Segmenting your lists into different categories based on interests or demographics can help increase engagement rates and so make certain, that the right people are receiving relevant content they want to see in their inboxes instead of being bombarded with irrelevant content they don’t care about.
Likewise, if you have a bulk list of subscribers then, it would be better that you break those lists into parts and send the email campaign in batches.
This way your sending server will not get stuck and your emails will not be in the queue instead, such a tactic helps in maintaining your server reputation with better deliverability results.
5. Keep Your Email List Clean
Remove any inactive subscribers from your list and avoid sending emails to addresses that are bouncing back or marked as spam. It reduces the risk of being flagged as a spammer and prevents you from bounces, which may cause damage to your sender’s reputation.
In fact, every email marketing expert utilizes some professional list-cleaning tool prior to sending bulk emails. We, at MailCleanup, offer one of the most robust and affordable email verification services. Our software is perfectly capable of removing such invalid and expired email addresses.
Cleaning your email lists not only helps them in removing invalid email addresses but essentially assists you in downgrading to the suitable subscription plan in your email marketing software. The removal of invalid email addresses lowers the overall subscriber count which ultimately reduces the additional costs which you were unknowingly paying for inactive addresses.
6. Use A Reputable Email Service Provider (ESP)
Check that your emails are being sent from a reliable, trustworthy source. This will help ensure that your emails are delivered to the intended recipients’ inboxes; as such ESP has sophisticated algorithms in place to prevent emails from being marked as spam.
Using a reputable email marketing service such as MailChimp or Constant Contact has advantages because it not only increases inbox rate but also ensures that you are adhering to standard deliverability strategies while also providing useful analytics on how successful your campaigns are.
7. Keep Content Clean & Concise
Make sure you’re following best practices when it comes to email marketing like; using a clear and concise subject line, avoiding using too many images, all caps, or gimmicks that can confuse recipients about what they’re receiving in their inboxes.
Also, spam filters are programmed to recognize certain words, phrases,(such as “free,” “click here,” “act now” etc.) and other content that can trigger it to send your emails straight to the spam folder.
In addition, include a clear call to action in your emails. A call to action can either ensures or jeopardize the success of your email campaign. If you use the right words, your CTA will inspire your audience to take action. On the other hand, if your CTA isn’t captivating and persuasive, your audience will keep scrolling back.
8. Personalize Your Emails
Personalizing emails with the recipient’s name can help improve engagement rates and increase the chances of getting delivered to their inbox instead of the junk folder.
Sending targeted emails with information that is relevant to each recipient, will increase the likelihood that they’ll open and engage with your message.
9. Monitor Your Sender’s Reputation
Keep a close eye on the reputation of your sender by using an email deliverability monitoring tool like Return Path, SenderScore, MxToolbox, or other third-party services to ensure you are staying on top of any issues that may arise with your deliverability.
Besides this, regularly monitor where your emails are ending up to make sure they’re not being blocked by various ISPs and mail providers like Gmail, Yahoo, etc., which could hurt your deliverability rate in the long run.
10. Use a Dedicated IP Address
Everything on the internet, including email addresses, has two identifying addresses: the domain name address and the IP address. Furthermore, if your IP address has a bad reputation, you have a lower chance of successfully delivering a message from that address.
For instance, when you use a shared IP, chances are that other users may be misusing it, causing the overall reputation to decline. Take a look at this screenshot for a better understanding –
Meanwhile, having a dedicated IP address for your emails allows you to build up a reputation with ISPs and can help improve delivery rates.
A dedicated IP address has numerous advantages, including increased site speed and security. Because you are the only one using the IP address, there is no way your IP will be blocked unless you do something malicious like sending out spam emails.
Conclusion
As you now have a comprehensive list of the best ways to improve email deliverability, you should be able to identify the key factors influencing your deliverability rate and the changes you need to make in your future email campaigns.
Use these suggestions to boost the deliverability of your next email marketing campaign and ensure that your emails reach their intended recipients.
Here are other blog posts that you should read –