5 Tips For Improving Email Deliverability
Email campaigns are a great way to gain exposure for your brand, build trust with prospects, and nurture loyalty among current customers. Ultimately, these engagements drive conversions and impact a company’s bottom line. Email marketing is a cost-effective way to market a B2C business, no matter the size, goals, or industry.
Whether an e-commerce business aims to drive conversions through discounts and sale alerts, or an agency wants to build an audience through captivating newsletters. It makes sense for marketers to employ email campaigns as part of their overall strategy.
But your emails can only make an impact if your audience receives them. Emails won’t help anyone if they land in spam. In fact, when emails are filtered as spam, it can hurt your brand.
Simple oversight can threaten email deliverability. Below are five tips to ensure that doesn’t happen.
Track key data and engagement rates
The most useful performance metrics for marketers are click-throughs, list growth, conversions, and ROI. These are excellent indicators of how well your email campaigns are performing. But regarding email deliverability specifically, marketers should watch CTR and other user engagement markers.
Emails with low open rates can trigger spam filters and send your messages into spam. Specifically, emails deleted without being opened are red flags for email providers. Gmail also considers the frequency of replies and forwards. These numbers can determine how engaging users find incoming messages.
If you create emails with your audience in mind, deliverability shouldn’t be a problem.
Focus on creating punchy subject lines that will appeal to your target audience. Free tools like Net Atlantic’s Email Subject Line Grader or Co-Schedule’s Email Subject Line Tester will help you create a compelling hook. Just don’t lose sight of your brand’s voice.
Consider the best time to send emails.
Finally, look into how you can personalize emails and segment your lists to increase their open rates, as well as click-throughs.
The more people engage with your emails, the further your emails will be from the junk folder.
Regularly review your mailing lists
Go through your mailing lists every couple of months to remove contacts who never open your messages. Try a re-engagement campaign first. However, if subscribers remain unresponsive, it’s time to remove them.
After removing inactive subscribers, you can expect an initial boost to your email marketing metrics. Refreshing your email lists will increase open rates and overall engagement—keeping email providers happy.
Sending messages to inactive accounts is another trigger for spam filters, so scheduling routine checks are highly recommended.
Frequent reviews will benefit your email campaigns in the long-term and lead to an increase in your overall open rates over time.
Optimize your emails to avoid complaints
All email dashboards are equipped with a “mark as spam” button. This button allows users to easily report irritating emails. The rate of complaints you receive can be seen in your email reports.
While even the best of newsletters will occasionally be flagged, a significant number of complaints can negatively impact your email deliverability and result in blacklisted future emails.
To reduce the number of complaints your emails receive, make sure your branding is evident in your emails. This way, members of your mailing list will recognize your business and remember why you’re emailing them. But make sure you only contact people who have signed up for your updates.
Additionally, include an “unsubscribe” option at the bottom of your emails. Not only does this encourage a positive user experience, but it’s also the law.
Usually, opt-out options are placed at the end of emails. It’s also a smart idea to include a feedback form asking why users opted out. Alternatively, you can offer users various opt-in options based on frequency or email type. This gives users options, discouraging them from unsubscribing completely.
In the below example from InVision, subscribers can choose to unsubscribe or opt for fewer emails based on preferences. They could opt out of the weekly digest, but stay informed of upcoming events.
Using email list segmentation and sending targeted personalized messages can also reduce spam complaints as your content will be adjusted to your audience.
Use trusted, trackable links
Avoid using generic short links in your marketing emails. Even if they lead to insightful content from reliable sources, they can be blacklisted. This will hurt the deliverability of your emails.
Whether you’re pasting a link into the body of an email or hyperlinking a piece of text, make sure to use a branded link.
Branded links are created using your own domain, whereas generic short links use a domain that is accessible to anyone, including spammers. This is why generic URLs are at risk of being blacklisted by email services as they have in the past.
Besides, you wouldn’t send out emails using a generic email address. So why would you use generic short links? Like generic emails, these can be associated with spam and malicious content.
Branded links are trustworthy and will increase the deliverability of your emails. They can also provide tracking data and incorporate UTM parameters for marketers.
Make your team aware of phrases to avoid
Using certain words in your emails can trigger email servers’ spam defenses. Among some of the most common trigger words are:
- Win
- Don’t hesitate
- 50% off
- Join millions of Americans
- Exclusive deal
Check if there are any phrases that your marketing team are at risk of using and if so, let them know about the risks. Though, it’s not necessarily the end of the world if one of these terms is used in an email blast.
Email providers have become much more skilled at detecting spam and context is key. So, if you accidentally use a phrase from the list, it doesn’t necessarily spell doom.
Some handy tools can check your copy for spam trigger words. Postmark’s will give you a rating. Green means your message is good to go. While the Email Copy Checker will highlight any trigger words you’ve included in your text.
Conclusion
Following these tips will help ensure your marketing messages make it to the inbox of prospects. They are all fairly easy to implement, so it is worth taking some time to educate your team on how to increase email deliverability and ensure that all your email marketing activities are in-line with best practices.
These tips can also improve the experience of your customers and help your marketing emails more impactful.