What is Email Deliverability?
Email deliverability is the process of ensuring your email ends up in your subscriber’s inbox – rather than in the spam folder, promotions folder, or blocked altogether by the ISP (Internet Service Provider). Most ESPs (Email Service Providers) allow you to track your deliverability rate – something all marketers should do.
Why do some emails end up in the Spam or Promotions folders?
- Your emails have received too many complaints
- The chances of your emails landing in the spam/junk folder or your IP landing on a blacklist increase each time a recipient flags your email as spam
- You never asked permission to email recipients
- Sending emails to people who have never opt-ed into your email campaigns makes it much more likely for your emails to receive a low deliverability rate
- You are sending irrelevant emails
- Your email deliverability rate will increase if you focus on sending relevant emails to a specific audience – rather than a mass email to all subscribers, regardless of their similarities/differences.
- Pro Tip: Check out this article we wrote on email list segmentation – a great way to increase deliverability
- You were Blacklisted
- You may end up on a Blacklist if your domain and/or IP address has been reported to be “known” sources of spam (i.e. you did the previous 3 points one too many times…)
- It is likely that your email deliverability rates will fall drastically if you are blacklisted
Email best practices to improve deliverability
Ensure your marketing campaigns are consistent
Sending a consistent frequency of marketing emails can help increase your Sender Reputation, therefore increasing your deliverability rates. Rather than sending emails any day at random times, find a day or two each week to send your marketing emails i.e. send your weekly newsletter every Thursday at 1pm.
Consistency also helps improve your open and click-through rate because your audience will understand your schedule.
Use "Clean" Email Lists
Try to stay out of the habit to just add everyone and their grandma to your marketing email lists. You should “know” your audience and they should “know” you because they chose receive your emails via opt-in, whether through a signup on your website, at checkout, or other similar areas.
You also shouldn’t just buy an email list from a company and blast a ton of cold emails to it, as this will cause many emails to bounce (aka they don’t reach the recipients inbox anyway). A bounce can happen 2 ways: hard bounce (you sent an email to an address that doesn’t exist) or soft bounce (recipient’s inbox is full or they have an auto-reply set up).
Keep an eye on how many “unknown” users you have in your email list and your bounce rate to improve email deliverability.
Don't use "Spammy" language
Certain words or phrases in your email and/or subject lines may automatically flag your email as spam, before it even gets to your recipient! First look at your subject lines, as they play a critical role in your email performance, whether its deliverability, open rate, or click-through rate. While your company may actually be offering something for free, avoid using words that may come off as spam in your subject lines such as:
- FREE!
- Money
- Help
- Reminder!
- Winner
Not only is the language you use critical to landing in an inbox, so is your punctation and use of emojis. Excessive use of punctuation such as “!!!!!” or “???!?!!?” can trigger a spam filter, as can too many or irrelevant emojis.
Include a Preferences & Unsubscribe Page
While it’s disappointing when someone chooses to receive your emails less frequently (or stop getting them altogether), allowing your audience to choose how frequently they hear from you will hedge the chances that your emails stay away from the spam folder, and keep the visitor happy with your brand as a whole. Increased happiness with your brand translates to higher engagement and conversion – Thus a preference center often results in better deliverability.
Knowing how to increase your deliverability rate and what is impacting you negatively can help those carefully and thoughtfully crafted marketing emails actually land in the intended inboxes, creating a higher return for your company!
We understand Email Devlierability can be a confusing and complex roadblock when launching email marketing campaigns. If you would like help with email deliverability, or email marketing management in general, please reach out to us here at Exit Intelligence and we would love to share best practices and help out!