Imagine this: each meticulously crafted email, each compelling call-to-action, and each ounce of effort invested in your email marketing campaign will only yield results if your messages land in your subscribers’ inboxes. The equation is simple but powerful: higher email deliverability translates into increased engagement, improved conversion rates, and, ultimately, a greater return on your email marketing investment.
Through this blog, we will equip you with the knowledge, strategies, and insights needed to elevate your email deliverability. We will explore industry best practices and shed light on emerging trends that matter most in email deliverability.
In this era of data-driven decision-making, the correlation between email deliverability and ROI is undeniable. Studies have shown that companies that prioritize and achieve high deliverability rates experience significant boosts in their email marketing success metrics, including open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates.
Industry best practices
From optimizing sender reputation and implementing authentication protocols to managing subscriber engagement and refining your content strategy, four critical things impact deliverability.
1. Optimizing sender reputation
Maintaining a positive sender reputation is crucial for good deliverability. Practical tips on improving your reputation include using reputable email service providers, adhering to industry guidelines, and monitoring feedback loops.
2. Implementing authentication protocols
Authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC establish your email’s legitimacy and help prevent spoofing and phishing attacks. They also improve deliverability when you implement them correctly.
3. Managing subscriber engagement
Engaging subscribers and managing your email list is the key to maintaining good deliverability. Five things to watch for are managing bounces, handling unsubscribes, re-engaging inactive subscribers, segmentation, and content personalization.
4. Crafting engaging content
Content is king, even when it comes to deliverability. Create compelling subject lines, avoid spam triggers, and keep the design unique. Strike the right balance between promotional and informative content to prevent your messages from being marked as spam.
5. Choosing the right ESP
An ESP acts as the gateway between your business and the user’s inbox; it is, therefore, vital to select a reliable and reputed provider. A good ESP will offer robust email infrastructure, dedicated IP addresses, load balancing, bounce handling, list hygiene, email feedback loops, detailed analytics and reporting, and scalable server capacity to handle high email volumes and yet maintain consistently high deliverability.
The right ESP will stay up to date with industry best practices and evolving email deliverability standards. They will proactively adapt their infrastructure and processes to ensure optimal deliverability, helping you stay ahead of any technical challenges.
Ensuring email list hygiene
Managing email list hygiene (as part of managing subscriber engagement) is perhaps the most crucial practice for ensuring high deliverability. Email list hygiene refers to regularly reviewing, managing, and cleansing your email list to ensure that it comprises engaged and active subscribers. Here’s what having a good email list hygiene means:
i. Enhances sender reputation
Maintaining a positive sender reputation is vital for email deliverability. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and email service providers evaluate the reputation of senders to determine whether their emails should be delivered to recipients’ inboxes or routed to spam folders. A clean email list with low bounce rates and high engagement signals to ISPs that your emails are relevant and wanted by recipients. This, in turn, improves your sender reputation.
ii. Reduces bounce rates
Bounces occur when an email cannot be delivered to a recipient’s inbox. High bounce rates can negatively impact your sender reputation and deliverability. Regularly cleaning your email list can identify and remove invalid email addresses, reducing both hard bounces (permanent delivery failures) and soft bounces (temporary delivery issues). This proactive approach helps maintain a low bounce rate and improve email deliverability.
iii. Improves engagement metrics
Engagement metrics, such as open and click-through rates, play a significant role in determining the success of your email campaigns. A clean and engaged email list ensures that your emails reach recipients genuinely interested in your content, increasing the likelihood of higher open and click-through rates. By removing inactive or unengaged subscribers, you can focus your efforts on those more likely to engage, resulting in improved performance.
iv. Minimizes complaints and spam traps
Complaints, such as recipients marking your emails as spam, can harm your sender reputation and deliverability. Maintaining email list hygiene helps minimize the chances of sending emails to uninterestedò recipients. Regularly removing inactive or unresponsive subscribers helps to reduce the risk of hitting spam traps, which are email addresses maintained by ISPs or anti-spam organizations to identify spammers.
v. Saves resources and costs
Maintaining a bloated and unengaged email list can waste valuable resources and increase costs. Sending emails to inactive or unresponsive subscribers decreases engagement rates and consumes resources, server bandwidth, and email service provider fees. By regularly cleaning your email list and removing unengaged subscribers, you can optimize your resources, improve campaign efficiency, and potentially reduce costs associated with email marketing.
Summing it up
Email deliverability is the foundation upon which successful email marketing campaigns are built. It’s the art of ensuring that your messages reach the inbox to captivate and resonate with your audience. In an era of overflowing inboxes, achieving high deliverability is the key to meaningful customer engagement, increased conversions, and remarkable return on investment. By prioritizing deliverability, you’ll unleash the full potential of your campaigns in the ever-evolving email landscape.
Choosing the right ESP to ensure high deliverability is a long-term investment in your business’s reputation and customer relationships. With high deliverability, you can build trust, maintain brand consistency, and maximize the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts, ultimately driving revenue and business growth.
We are leaders in email deliverability and the world’s most recommended ESP, as acknowledged by G2.com. For the second year in a row, Netcore received the highest overall customer rating as a customers’ choice in the 2022 Gartner Peer Insights ‘Voice of the Customer’ Report.
Connect with us to understand how you can benefit from our expertise and experience – we send over 20 billion emails a month on behalf of 6500+ businesses across 40 countries.
