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It goes without saying, but if your emails aren’t getting delivered, then your email marketing efforts are a massive waste of your company’s time and money. Email deliverability is the number one metric we should all be driving to as email marketers.
You’ve probably already read all the tips about subject lines, open rates, engaging content, powerful CTAs, and strategic email landing pages. We’re going to take a big step back from all of that and look at the picture from its most foundational level — email deliverability.
How to Improve Your Email Deliverability
1. Prime Your IPs and Register Subdomains
One of the primary jobs of an ISP is to protect its users from spam emails. Proving to the ISPs that your brand is trustworthy and valid enough for them to allow your emails to land in the inbox instead of spam is your top priority as a marketer.
Warming up or priming your brand’s IPs and subdomains is a great way to increase your email deliverability rates. To help build trust with ISPs, start a new email campaign by sending emails out in small batches to addresses you know belong to your most engaged users. As these emails are opened and engaged by your target audience, your IP address and domain will begin to hear the trust of the ISP. As you send additional campaigns you can increase the number of emails within your batches until you reach the peak volume for your email list.
You can also create a subdomain that you can use exclusively for your marketing emails. While this isn’t the answer for everyone, for those who use it the right way, you’ll find that you’ll be able to build trust for that subdomain. While it could help your overall email deliverability, the real benefit of creating an exclusive marketing subdomain is that you’ll be able to conduct domain-specific reputation monitoring.
2. Monitor Your Sender Reputation
Odds are, if your emails aren’t being delivered, then you probably have a low sender score. Most ISPs will automatically reject emails from anyone with a low email sender score. The biggest reason why your emails are not delivered is due to a low sender score. ISPs automatically reject any emails that fall below a certain score.
Email reputation, or sender scores, range from 1 to 100. The higher your score, the better. It’s important to keep track of your score. There are several free tools you can use to help you check your score on a monthly basis.
3. Monitor Your Feedback Loops
Email Feedback Loops (FBL) is a dedicated service offered by some of the leading ISPs that will report back complaints to senders in the event of a subscriber hitting the spam or junk button in their inbox. This service helps senders in keeping a clean email list. The main aim of the Feedback Loops is to help senders listen to the subscribers and take necessary actions, including removing such subscribers from an email list.
Check out our detailed blog on Email Feedback Loops for specific information on how to manage this process with the most popular ISPs.
4. Implement Double Opt-in Process
As part of the CAN-SPAM Act, you must obtain permission from a user before emailing them. The email double opt-in process requires a user to complete the form and check the box, just as they do in the single opt-in process, but they then have to click a confirmation link or button that is sent to their email address.
When following this process, the user cannot be added to your marketing email list until they have clicked the link or button, officially confirming their permission.
5. Conduct Monthly Email Audits
When performed quarterly, an email deliverability audit is helpful in improving the performance of your email marketing campaigns. While the term “audit” can seem to be broad, meaning a variety of tasks, in common terms, it is the overall assessment of your email marketing processes.
Conducting a monthly or quarterly email audit ensures that you won’t send emails to non-existent users, which can ramp up your bounce rate and kill your sender reputation. Inactive users can have a negative impact as well, although they aren’t as deadly.
If you don’t have time to conduct the audits yourself, you can contact a paid service to help.t.
6. Create and Stick to a Schedule
One cause for lower sender score and IP rejection is random and erratic broadcast activity. If you are not maintaining a regular schedule with your emails, it creates sending spikes. Do your best to stick to a consistent email sending schedule.
And while you might have tons to share, too many emails can also burn out your audience. Try for 1 – 4 emails per month and do your best to ensure each one has something of value for your customers.
7. Use Your Brand in the Sender Name
Using your brand’s name in your “from” line will help to reduce spam complaints. It’s also been proven to improve open rates.
You can give your email deliverability strategy an additional boost by using email testing and validation tools before you send them. These tools will give you the information you need so you can adjust your emails before you send them, further increasing your odds of landing in the inbox every time.
Want to see how the MailMonitor suite of tools can help your business master email deliverability? Contact us and request a demo!
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