Effective Email Marketing: How to Drastically Improve Your Email Deliverability
Are your emails not making it to your subscribers’ inboxes? If so, this is a huge problem that will be solved once you will improve your email deliverability.
Even if one person is missing out on your emails, you need to try to get to the bottom of it. That one person could be a large sale that you’re missing out on.
In order to make sure that your emails are getting delivered, you need to look at your email deliverability. If your email deliverability is low, you’re wasting time, resources, and emails. They’re not even getting sent to your subscribers.
If you’re having this problem, your worrying can stop here. We’re going to talk about improving your email deliverability so that you can get control of your email marketing again.
1. Address Your Email Domain
If your delivery rates aren’t as high as you want them to be, you may be dealing with a spamming issue. This means that your email domain isn’t authenticated, leading your emails straight to the spam folder.
Authenticating your email domain takes a few steps, so you should make sure to set aside some time to get it done. You have to enable the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM).
If you don’t enable these two things, you run the risk that your email is taken over by someone else. This means that that person could take control of your domain and email everyone using your email address. Obviously, this isn’t a good thing.
It means that you don’t have control over your content. The person taking control of your email domain could be doing malicious things. This hurts your relationship with your subscribers and ensures that they won’t have a respectable view of your company.
2. Create a Successful IP
As your email list grows and grows, you need to make sure that you’re creating a successful IP. This means that you need to show the ISP (internet service provider) that your emails are coming from a trustworthy source.
If you’re just getting started, you shouldn’t have a tough time building up your IP. However, if your email list is already established, you may need to alter your strategy.
If you have a large email list, you need to prioritize your subscribers based on engagement. Send your emails to small batches of subscribers at once, starting with the most engaged members of your audience.
Once those engaged subscribers open and click-through your email, you’ve already made a great engagement rate. This shows the ISP that you’re a trustworthy and popular source for information. From there, you can send your emails to the rest of your subscribers.
As you send more and more emails, you can develop larger and larger batches.
For example, you may start with sending your emails to ten people at a time, then move to fifteen, twenty, thirty, and so on. For those of you with large email lists, this might be a lot to do. However, it’s worth it if you want to create authority.
Keep in mind that creating a successful IP address keeps your emails out of the spam folder. Once the ISPs see you as a credible source, you won’t have to worry about lost sales and unread emails.
3. Check Your Reputation
Using Sender Score, you can check your email domain’s reputation. The site will examine your domain and grade it on a variety of subjects and characteristics, including the following:
- Unsubscribe rate
- Spam reports
- Unknown users
- Sender rejected
Sender Score takes several different characteristics into account to ensure that they’re giving you an accurate picture of how the ISP sees your website.
Your score can range anywhere from 0 to 100, with 100 being perfect. This means that the higher the score you get, the better a chance you have at avoiding spam folders.
To avoid any question of emails getting lost in the spam folder, you should make sure that you’re keeping a close eye on your score. If you see it dip down, you may need to start by sending those small batches of emails like we talked about in section two.
4. Stick to a Schedule
If you’re sending out emails regularly, you need to have a consistent schedule. Sending emails whenever you feel like it isn’t going to work for your domain and your business as a whole.
Having a schedule will help you and your subscribers know when new content is coming out.
As you’re making your schedule we urge you to avoid sending too many emails too often. This wears out subscribers fast and can hurt your relationship with them.
We recommend sending no more than two emails a week. Plus, we always tell brands to offer a ‘digest’ option for those subscribers who want the occasional summary email rather than each individual email announcement.
With so many different kinds of content calendars out there, you’ll be able to create a schedule in a flash. If you’re having trouble coming up with content, try to start with subscriber suggestions or frequently asked questions. Your readers would love to see that you’re incorporating their suggestions and concerns into your content.
5. Incorporate a Double Opt-in System
If you don’t already have a double opt-in system, you need one now. The average business will simply have someone insert an email and press the subscribe button to get on the mailing list. However, the best businesses go a step further.
Instead of letting anyone put any email address in the box, they make the user confirm their email address. This ensures that the person understands what they’re signing up for and accepts the emails that you’re going to send in the future.
Plus, companies with a double opt-in system see a large decrease in spam reports. This is huge, especially for those companies that were getting as many as two to three spam reports per thousand emails. With this high of a percentage of spam reports, the ISP could block the emails you’re sending.
If you want to improve your analytics and prevent an issue with the ISP, you need to put a double opt-in system in place now.
6. Clean Up Your Email List
If you haven’t purged your email list any time soon, you need to carve out some time to do this as soon as possible. You probably have invalid emails, old contacts, unengaged users, and more issues roaming around that list.
First, start by removing or fixing any incorrect email addresses. All these are doing is sitting around and dragging down your analytics.
If you’re unsure whether or not an email is correct (based on a 0% engagement rate or other obvious analytic), then you should run email validation. By making sure these emails are valid, you’re confirming that these are people who meant to subscribe to your emails.
Next, you should look at the engagement rate of your remaining list. You need to think about those individuals who are the least engaged with your emails.
You can either reengage these individuals or remove them completely from your list. This means that you can take the time to reinterest them in your business by sending a coupon or reintroduction post or cut ties immediately.
Between these two choices, we recommend that you take the time to reintroduce yourself and try to get them interested in the company again. However, you need to understand that they may not take to this email either. Just be sure to make unsubscribing from your email list easier in these emails so that your less interested subscribers can remove themselves from the list.
The main reason that we’re worried about cleaning up your email list is that these old, uninterested users are ruining your email activity. In order to stay competitive and relevant, you need to keep an eye on your email activity and ensure that it’s exactly where you want it.
7. Get Rid of Contestants
Let’s start this section out by saying that you should never wager your email list for a contest. Period.
All this leads to a great rise in email subscribers followed by an even bigger fall. You might up a customer or two, but the small gain is not worth the big loss.
If you’ve done contests like these in the past, it’s likely that you have a few people still left on your email list from those entries. Unless those individuals are engaged, you need to remove them from your list.
Just like we previously stated, old and unengaged subscribers are just sitting there and hurting your analytics. You’re not getting anything out of it, and they’re not getting anything out of it.
Improving Email Deliverability
Getting a hold of your email marketing technique isn’t easy. With issues ranging from email deliverability to email analytics, you’ve got to juggle a lot at once.
That’s why you should let us help you.
At EmailOversight, we can help you get control of your email list again. By keeping up with your list, you’ll find that your email campaigns are more successful than ever before.
Check out our pricing here.
