If this title brought you here, it’s quite likely that you’re looking for answers to questions like how to improve email deliverability.
Sending fund-raising emails for a not-for-profit organization? Trying to woo customers to your ecommerce website? Working hard to attract clients for your SEO agency? The first gatekeeper of success of your entire email campaign is one single factor: email deliverability. As email marketing becomes more sophisticated, the question of email deliverability sees new dimensions added. First, what is email deliverability? Email deliverability refers to the ability of an email to reach the recipient’s inbox. If you noticed carefully, the operative term here is inbox. Which means email delivery is not the same as email deliverability. An email is considered delivered when it does not bounce. But that won’t always serve your purpose. An email that goes to the spam or promotional folder but doesn’t reach the inbox is, in all likelihood, never read. No one can take action on an email that they didn’t read. End of your campaign. Here’s a brief explanation. Let’s say you sent out an email to all your subscribers with a great Black Friday offer. For some reason, the recipient inbox felt it was a spam message. As a result, it directed your email to the spam folder of your recipient. And it won’t be read — remember 56.5% of email goes to the spam folder, as reported by Dataprot. People simply don’t pay attention to spam. See, the email didn’t bounce, so it’s considered to be delivered. But for all practical purposes, we’ll say that the email deliverability failed. That’s because it didn’t land in the inbox of the recipient. That means an email needs to reach the inbox, not anywhere else, to meet the conditions of email deliverability. 5 Types of Email that Improve Email Deliverability 1. Emails with good content and structure. It’s relatively easy to spot if an email is well-written and well-organized (Interestingly, a lot of phishing emails exhibit poor grammar). Here are the five components of an email with good content structure. Value: The content of your email must be relevant and valuable to the recipient. If the content matches the recipient’s expectations, it is more likely to be accepted as legitimate. Language: Your email needs to be easily readable. Poor choice of complex words (or even words that trigger the spam-filter) and bad grammar can alert the spam-filters faster than probably anything else. Clear Call To Action (CTA): What do you want the recipient to do? Make your CTA very, very clear. If the recipient has to work hard to understand what’s the CTA and how they can perform that action, there’s something wrong. Formatting: Avoid fancy fonts. Use only the standard black color for text. Use short sentences. Emails with unnecessary usage of upper-case letters, irrelevant variations of font size, or awkward formatting face great risks. Compliant: A good email carries an Unsubscribe link. Spammers don’t have this, so be sure to provide a clear way for your recipients to get off your email list. 2. Emails that are sent to a clean list. Email deliverability best practices include a clean list as part of the basic requirements. A clean list means a list that doesn’t contain spam-traps, invalid addresses, undeliverable addresses, poor-quality or otherwise undeliverable email addresses. Practically the only way to have and maintain a clean email list is to use some list cleaning service. While you can achieve some success in-house, it’s best to use special email verification tools to clean your email list. An email verification platform will quickly and reliably separate out the good email addresses from the bad ones, without actually sending emails to any of them. The email ecosystem will watch the history of how many of your emails actually land in the inbox or bounce. With a clean email list, your chances of email hard bounce are practically zero. That way, you are always on the safer side and can look forward to improved email deliverability. 3. Emails that are consistent in nature. There are two dimensions of consistency that you want to pay attention to: A. The consistency and frequency with which you send out emails. If you send out newsletters, say, every second and fourth Monday of the month, you stand a much better chance than someone who sends out emails irregularly. B. Pay attention to the past engagement. When your subscribers engage with your emails regularly and consistently, the email ecosystem understands that your subscribers find your emails useful. That means subsequent emails will land in the inbox and not in the spam folder. You will notice that being regular also, to some extent, contributes to your email engagement. When your emails are sent out regularly, the email ecosystem learns that you are a legitimate marketer or professional and that your emails don’t need to be punished. 4. Emails with proper authentication. Email authentication is slightly technical, but we will keep it simple. Three protocols take care of your email authentication: SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Each serves a different purpose. Also, none of them is very difficult to set up. Yet, senders of spam emails (e.g. phishing or fraudulent emails) avoid using authentication because in most cases they won’t be able to get authenticated. These authentications prove various kinds of security measures are in place and are working. They will authenticate that the email was sent from the domain it claims to have been sent from. They will authenticate that the contents of the email have not been changed after it was sent from a valid domain. 5. Emails with branding and A/B testing. While these are not as critical as authentication in the short-term, over a period of time, they grow in importance. Seasoned email marketers know that email deliverability is the first win they want. So their email content, design, and colors will establish a familiarity with the brand. Familiarity through branding helps build trust and engagement. Also, marketers keep using split tests (popularly known as A/B tests) to find out how their emails resonate with the audience. The results help them build engagement, which is important for email deliverability. Conclusion Email deliverability can make or break your email campaign. No wonder email marketers take it so seriously. Whether you’re just starting out or have been pursuing email campaigns for a while, we are sure the above will provide you great places to start from. If you’re a very small team, don’t be in a hurry to change everything. Start with the parts that are critical (authentication, followed by clean email lists), and then move on to the rest of the things. The idea is to begin and ensure consistency. So go ahead, take action, and see your email deliverability reach the high you deserve. Happy email marketing! Meet Our Contributor — Mayank Batavia Mayank Batavia is Head of Marketing and Partnerships at Quick Email Verification. In addition to the wonderful world of email marketing, Mayank loves Math puzzles and is trying to get ahead in Wordle. He thinks pears and mangoes are the best things that ever happened and cannot say no to a cup of coffee. Explore email marketing here.
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |