Best Practices to Improve Email Deliverability

Marketers can spend all their time crafting the perfect email campaign but none of it matters if their emails aren’t delivered to their subscribers’ inboxes! It’s easy to become overly fixated on the email design, headline, or copy of your email marketing campaign. While all of these factors are important, you won’t showcase the best of your brand if you have poor email deliverability.

The success of your email marketing campaign hinges on your company’s image as a reputable business. Unfortunately, as of February of 2020, 20.4% of all emails sent are either sent to spam or remain undelivered, and we want to make sure that this isn’t you. Luckily, there are several actions that you can take to improve your email deliverability.

What is email deliverability?

Email deliverability is precisely what it sounds like: the ability to deliver emails to your subscribers. However, this isn’t all that simple. You might have a high email deliverability rate, but that’s not enough. This number only measures the number of emails that made it to the recipient. What’s important to marketers is inbox placement. Inbox placement is simply a metric that measures whether or not the email sent winds up in the recipient’s inbox.

How can I improve my email deliverability?

With billions of emails being blasted out each day, the only way that marketers can improve their email deliverability and inbox placement is by understanding how ISPs work and using it to their advantage.

ISP stands for Internet Service Provider, and they’re in charge of managing the 306 billion emails sent every day. ISPs keep track of who opens your emails and who doesn’t. Of course, if the emails are consistently unopened, they will be marked as spam.

Build Your IP Reputation

You want ISPs to trust your content so that your emails aren’t written off as spam. The first step to building trust is through building your IP Reputation. Essentially, this means steadily building a stream of subscribers that regularly open your emails. The best way to do this is by building up your subscriber’s list slowly. Start with a small batch of people that are genuinely interested in your product or service. As ISPs see people engaging with your content and opening the email, your credibility will improve.

To build the best subscriber’s list possible, use an email marketing automation system to separate the email addresses that engage with your content from the ones that don’t. If you’re constantly sending out emails to subscribers that aren’t engaging with your content, it will damage your IP reputation.

Give Subscribers The Chance to Opt-In

This one’s a game-changer! Confirmed opt-in emails are paramount in making sure that your emails aren’t marked as spam. To take advantage of confirmed opt-in emails, all you need to do is use an email automation system to send an email that gives people the chance to verify that they’re interested in being a part of your subscriber’s list.

The thing you don’t want to do is use a single opt-in email campaign.  While the idea of forgoing sending an additional email to subscribers might sound like a great way to boost your number of subscribers, this will hurt you in the long run. If people don’t confirm that they’re interested in subscribing to your email list, you risk being reported as spam.

In addition, double opt-in email campaigns are proven to boost the quality of your leads, increase engagement, all while decreasing your unsubscribe rate.

Related: 6 Benefits of Opt-In Email Marketing

Don’t Send Too Many Emails

Sometimes, less is more, and this is true for opt-in email marketing. Sending too many emails is one of the worst things that you can do when you’re building a relationship with your subscribers. People might be excited about your brand, but once you’re blasting them with emails at all hours of the day, it will get on their nerves.

If you are starting to do this, there are only a few things that can happen. At best, subscribers simply ignore your email, but over time this will ruin your IP reputation. Otherwise, they might opt out of your email list, which means that you’re losing valuable customers. At worst, they’ll mark your email as spam.

Stay on a Schedule

One of the worst things you can do is send your emails whenever you feel like it. If you want your brand to have a successful email campaign and a good IP reputation, stick to a schedule. The consistency of a set schedule is excellent for improving your brand’s image. Your subscribers will come to expect emails on a set day. If you’re sending emails at irregular hours, it makes your business look unprofessional. However, if you don’t send emails often enough, people will forget that your company exists. It’s best to do a little research to determine the best day and time to send emails to your target audience. Once you have this figured out, stick to your schedule!

Related: When is the Best Time to Send an Email?

Use Email Segmentation

Email segmentation is undoubtedly one of the most important tools that marketers can use to skyrocket their engagement and lead conversions. If you aren’t familiar with this method, it’s essentially when brands send specific content to subscribers that they believe will engage with the content rather than send the same email to everybody on their list.

So, what does all this have to do with your email deliverability rate? First, email segmentation is an excellent way to improve your IP reputation. This is because when you send customized content to your customers, it alerts ISPs that you are sending them content that they want to see, and not just spam. Email segmentation has been proven to increase your brand’s open rate by 14.31%.

Related: Email List Segmentation Best Practices For High Open Rate

MailBakery

With the right tools, improving your email deliverability is easy as pie. All it takes is a calculated approach to your opt-in emails, schedule, and content crafted for a specific audience for an excellent IP reputation. Once you’ve got that down, MailBakery can help with the rest. We’re here to supply you with stunning, custom-made email templates that your subscribers can’t resist. Teaming up with us will inspire your customers to engage with your content and increase your brand awareness so that you can focus on running the most lucrative business possible.

We design and code email templates for marketing campaigns. Working together, we can bring your visions to life and create stunning, brand-specific email templates that are sure to captivate and convert.

Ready to get started? Contact our team, and let’s get in the kitchen!