The likelihood of your campaigns reaching your customers’ inboxes is called email deliverability.
It is one of the factors that define the success of email campaigns. To measure campaign deliverability, a marketer needs to compare the total amount of campaigns sent versus the number of campaigns that were bounced, rejected, blocked, ignored, and sent to the spam box.
Marketers who keep on sending campaigns with low email deliverability rates are wasting a lot of time, money, and effort. This is because they are spending a lot on SMTP relay services, CRM software, email marketing platforms, and paid domains while their campaigns receive low to zero opens and clicks. Not to mention that writing a good campaign takes a lot of time and thought.
But you can prevent this from happening to you by reading this article.
Boost Email Deliverability With These Tips
If you’re just getting into email marketing, you need to learn how to start fresh and build a sender’s reputation. If you face problems regarding your deliverability rates, you can also use these tips to increase the chances of your campaigns landing in your customers’ inboxes.
#1 Do IP warming
IP warmup establishes your reputation as a legitimate email marketer. To do this, you need to start sending campaigns at a low volume daily using a dedicated IP and domain. Then, gradually increase your sending volume until you achieve your desired daily delivery quota.
Without IP warming, internet and email service providers (ISPs and ESPs) will consider your sending behavior as suspicious thus making your campaigns end up in the spam box – or get rejected, blocked, bounced, or ignored.
#2 Be consistent with your sending schedule
Another factor that determines your sender’s reputation is the schedule of your campaign delivery. You must establish a routine for which days of the week you’ll be sending campaigns and how much you’ll send on those days.
Like doing email marketing with the lack of IP warming, not following a consistent sending schedule increases the chances of your campaigns not landing into your customers’ inboxes. ISPs and ESPs prioritize the receiving of emails from sender’s with predictable data. This is to protect their clients from receiving malicious messages coming from cybercriminals.
#3 Segment to create personalized emails
The third factor that determines the deliverability of your campaigns is the interaction they receive from your recipients. For example, if you deliver highly personalized campaigns as a result of good list segmentation, your campaigns will receive a lot of opens and click-throughs.
ISPs and ESPs will detect this as a sign that you’re a sender that sends legitimate campaigns. This makes you worthy of having your messages delivered straight to user inboxes. Those who deliver non-personalized emails will receive higher disengagement rates, increasing their chances of having their campaigns marked as “low priority” or “needs to be reviewed.”
#4 Set up double opt-in
The double opt-in system’s main purpose is to add a layer of security to the signup process by filtering out bots and spam traps. The result is that only those who are truly interested in your content get to join your mailing list. Spambots scour the internet in search of pages and join forums to promote whatever their operator is selling.
Some of these bots only join your mailing list to breach cybersecurity. They may steal information from users or send them spam messages. When it comes to spam traps, it’s quite different. They join mailing lists to detect bad marketing practices and can affect your sender’s reputation.
These traps are operated by anti-spam organizations and ISPs. Although they are useful in keeping the internet safe, you don’t know which elements of an email fit their criteria for being spammy. You could commit a mistake and end up having your sender’s reputation drop.
#5 Authenticate your email domain
In addition to IP warming, authenticating your domain is also a must as a beginner email marketer. A lack of authentication affects your deliverability rates by making your IP and domain vulnerable to spoofing and hijacking. This is very important especially for growing businesses.
Spoofing is when cybercriminals send malicious emails claiming to be you. They do this by using your IP address or domain name in the sender’s details. Once reported by a user, it’s the reputation of your domain and IP that gets affected. Most of the time, this scenario will get your IP and domain blacklisted by ISPs and ESPs.
Hijacking is a form of malicious email delivery where cybercriminals intercept your message during delivery. They will then insert something nefarious like wire fraud software before your intended recipient receives your email.
Through email authentication, you can prevent these attacks from happening. Your customers will be able to receive untampered and legitimate campaigns from you making their buying experience safer.
#6 Keep a clean mailing list
As mentioned in #4, you need to keep spam bots and spam traps from joining your mailing list. This cannot be done by setting up a double opt-in alone. You need to avoid buying from purchased lists as these lists contain a lot of bad email addresses. Grow your mailing list with these strategies.
You also need to regularly monitor the users in your list. Customers who have been inactive for a long time need to be removed through the process of email scrubbing. The longer these inactive users stay in your list, the more your sender’s reputation dwindles.
#7 Avoid delivering spammy content
Spam traps aren’t the only system on the internet that checks email campaigns for spamminess. ISPs and ESPs also have their own spam-checking tool. That’s why you need to be careful when writing subject lines and campaign content.
Be familiar with words/phrases like “Cheap”, “Buy”, or “Once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” and avoid using them. Avoid writing long subject lines and the use of exclamation points. Failure to do so will cause a drop in your campaign deliverability rates. A lot of customers also find this annoying and would report your campaigns as spam.
Conclusion
Improving your email deliverability starts with learning how ISPs and ESPs work. They are the primary entities that dictate the inbox-worthiness of your campaigns. Build a reputation first through IP warming.
Show that you care for your customers’ safety through email authentication. Deliver relevant and professionally written content. Follow a consistent campaign sending schedule and keep the bots out of your mailing list. With these tips, you’ll be able to get most of your investment and achieve higher returns.
Baburajan Kizhakedath
