The best way to determine the overall success of your email marketing campaign is the return on investment you get from it.
According to a report, email campaigns drive an estimated $42 ROI for every $1 spent, which is higher compared to any other marketing channel used nowadays. This still makes email a viable strategy and one of the most effective methods of driving leads.
The problem with many marketers, however, is that many of their campaigns aren’t reaching the ROI they want. Although there are many reasons for this email deliverability concern, the root of the problem is simply because their messages aren’t even reaching their recipients’ inboxes.
Figuring out your email ROI is difficult if you don’t know which emails reach the inbox.
How to Know If My Emails Are Reaching the Desired Destination?
There is no reliable way of knowing if a recipient has read the email that you just sent.
However, there are three techniques you can apply to provide you with some confirmation. These are:
- Using the Read Receipt feature of select email service providers
- Incorporating a delivery receipt
- Applying an image through an HTML-based email
The Read Receipt feature is the most common of these methods. It allows you to know the exact time that your email was opened and read by the person on the other end.
What’s unique about these Read Receipts is that they act as virtual nudges that tell recipients to write back or engage with your message. This can be great when you want to keep track of urgent emails.
The problem here is privacy. Although read receipts are a good way of letting you know if your messages are reaching their intended destinations, they can be intrusive to some people. These individuals may even choose not to respond to these receipts because of the intrusion.
- Outlook read receipts: requesting a read receipt in Microsoft Outlook is easy. Simply click on Options and check the “Request a Read Receipt” choice to get a notification each time a recipient opens a message. There’s also the option “Request a Delivery Receipt” which notifies you when the message you sent has been delivered successfully.
- Thunderbird read receipts: For Mozilla Thunderbird, select Tools and then click on the Options button. From the General tab, click “Return Receipts” and configure it to include return receipts with your messages. It’s also possible to have your own return receipts and location sent. Simply click the Ok button once you’re done.
- Gmail read receipts: The Read Receipt feature is only available with the paid business cloud software suite of Google called G Suite. As a subscriber, you can activate read receipt requests by clicking Apps > GSuite > Settings for Gmail and then clicking on Advanced Settings. Scroll down and click “Allow email read receipts to be sent to all addresses in my organization as well as the following email addresses” to turn it on. This option will let you click the request a read receipt option for a specific email that you’re working on.
Keep in mind that a request made by a read receipt only does half the job. It’s still up to the recipient if they want to accept or decline it.
Reasons Why Your Campaigns Might Not Be Reaching Your Clients’ Inbox
Your ability to reach the inbox of your clients is the most crucial aspect in generating the ROI you need. This is simply because messages that can’t reach your recipients are ineffective and basically useless.
If you’ve noticed that your marketing results have gone down lately, here are several reasons to consider:
Your Emails Lack Personalization
The templates available in email marketing offer an excellent way to quickly and effectively bring your message across to the target audience. But when you just send that template out without making custom changes, you’ll be sending an impersonal message that isn’t personalized for anyone.
Proper A/B testing and experimentation can give you an idea of which personalization techniques you should apply.
The first thing you should do is to make sure your emails address the readers by their name. People who receive messages that directly mention their name is a great way to catch their attention.
Another approach would be to have a team member send out the emails using their personal account. In this way, recipients will feel that the message comes from a real person and not just an emotionless brand or company.
Your Email Design Isn’t Effective
The design of your email is the first thing people see when they open it. Email design plays an important role in getting users to engage and interact with your message.
To ensure your email design is effective, you should follow these rules:
- Practice minimalism: Adding too many design choices in your emails is unnecessary since it can overwhelm and distract your readers. You want to make sure the design of your messages is simple and prioritize how you present your content.
- Make it brief: Avoid writing lengthy messages to recipients, as people nowadays have less time to read. Instead, you want your emails to be clear, personalized, and straight to the point.
- Incorporate responsive design: No matter how gorgeous your email designs are, they won’t serve their purpose if they don’t fit the screen of mobile users. With more people using smartphones, there’s a good chance that many of your subscribers will be accessing your emails on a mobile device with smaller screens than a desktop.
- Employ a professional signature: You want to include a unique signature at the end of your messages to leave a lasting impression on your recipients. Ensure that this signature has all necessary contact details included.
When it comes to email design, there’s no single approach that will incorporate all of the positive aspects needed to improve email deliverability. After all, each audience will expect something different out of your emails. It’s important to use various email design techniques to find out how users respond.
You Haven’t Segmented Your Mailing List Yet
Segmentation allows you to separate your audience by batch according to various preferences. It could be based on their behavior, their past purchases, or geography. Segmenting lets you personalize your messages so that they will resonate better with your readers.
The way you segment your recipients will highly depend on what data you have on your users. After obtaining all the information you need, you can then create more customized messages for your recipients.
You’re Not Optimizing Your Subject Lines
People receive many emails each day, which can make it difficult for anyone to notice generic subject lines. That’s why you want your subject lines to be eye-catching and related to your recipients.
Accomplishing this task is vital for your email marketing campaigns if you wish them to succeed. People will skip email subject lines that are poorly written. They may not understand what the email is about, or they may view it as spam.
Besides being catchy and transparent, you want your subject lines to be brief and straightforward. Avoid misleading your audience as this will backfire and cause problems later on.
You Haven’t Reviewed Your Analytics
Email marketing is all about assessing your performance and checking which metrics you can improve upon to be more effective. There are many metrics to consider but some of the most essential are:
- Your open rates: The open rates of your emails is one way to know the effectiveness of your subject lines and how active your subscribers are. When you have poor open rates, this often means that people aren’t interested in your content.
- Your click-through rates: Your click-through rates are a direct indication of your email design’s quality. Are you using the appropriate fonts? Is your CTA clear and direct? You need to test and experiment here to find out which design would result in the most clicks.
- Your unsubscribe rates: Having irrelevant content in your messages is often the cause for people in your mailing list to unsubscribe. It’s important to change your approach and ensure your content brings value to your consumers.
As an email marketer, you want to make sure that you keep an eye on these stats since they will help in creating an effective email campaign. The idea is to constantly perform tests on your content to continue providing relevant and engaging emails to your audience.
You Built an Irrelevant Mailing List
The main reason why people subscribe to your mailing list is that they want to receive content that is relevant to them. If you build your mailing list incorrectly, this means that the messages you send will be irrelevant to them and won’t meet their expectations.
For instance, promising readers that you’ll provide them with the latest news on your niche but instead sending them messages about your products is not according to what they expect. Since your audience signed up for one thing and you give another, you’ll most likely find people unsubscribing, or worse, sending your emails straight to the spam folder.
You Bought Your Email List
Buying a mailing list is one of the biggest mistakes email marketers can make today. This is because sending messages to a purchased list will often result in providing people with irrelevant content.
You can’t expect to receive positive results when you send to a mailing list that didn’t sign up for your emails. This can easily be considered spam and most users won’t hesitate in marking your messages as such.
Furthermore, it’s illegal to purchase email lists from third-party service providers since you’re essentially buying the private data of others. It’s always a better option to spend time building your email list slowly since your recipients have the highest probability of being interested in what you offer.
How Is the Success or Failure of Email Deliverability Determined?
Here are the main parameters for you to consider on what determines the success or failure of your email deliverability.
- Sending to invalid addresses: Sending to dead email addresses within your mailing list is a major indication that you’re practicing poor email hygiene or purchased your list from a third-party provider. Mailbox providers and anti-spam agencies have ways to track senders who frequently send to invalid addresses and keep a closer eye on them than others.
- Receiving spam complaints: A spam complaint is a report filed against an email sender when a person marks one of their messages as spam. This signals mailbox providers that your IP address can’t be trusted.
- Sending to spam trap addresses: A spam trap email address is an address that is being used by an anti-spam organization or internet service provider to catch spammers. Regardless of your intentions, if you take the bait, you’ll be labelled as a spammer. In addition, when you send emails to spam trap addresses, they are not monitored by real people. This will negatively affect your analytics and cause them to be inaccurate.
- Incorporating the right sending infrastructure: This includes the reputation of the sender, their IP address reputation, and email authentication. Some examples of the latter include Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM).
- How often you send messages: One of the best ways you can improve email deliverability is to send emails using the same IP with the appropriate consistency month after month. This is because spammers often rotate which IPs they use and aren’t consistent with their messages as well. When ISPs or anti-spam entities notice addresses sending infrequent emails in large volumes, this is one indication of spam-like activity.
- Your IP and domain reputation: ISPs provide each email sender with a specific IP and domain score, which is basically their reputation. IP reputation depends heavily on whether the user is on a shared or dedicated address. With shared IP addresses, their sender reputation can be affected if someone in their network is sending malicious emails.
- Whether your emails are engaging or not: This determines what people do with your emails once it reaches their inbox. Do users open your messages or delete them right away? Do they click on any links or mark your emails as spam? ISPs pay close attention to the actions of their users who receive your emails since they use it as an indication of how trustworthy you are as a sender.
- How you format the content of your email: Email content should be one of the main priorities of marketers who want to avoid messages that appear spam-like. Make sure that the HTML elements and links that you include in your email are embedded appropriately. Any broken HTML code and blacklisted URLs can significantly affect email deliverability.
- Your spam rate: The spam rate of your email marketing campaigns is the percentage of messages that have been sent to the spam folder out of all those that you sent. This is an indication that you can be trusted. An ideal spam rate is one that doesn’t go past 0.1%.
- Email delivery errors: Receiving errors on sending your emails often means that they could not be delivered to the specified email addresses. There are temporary (soft bounce) and permanent (hard bounce) email delivery errors that can happen.
Once again, testing offers one of the keys to knowing what’s causing the problem with your poor email delivery rate. Make sure you apply the appropriate tests and tools to check which areas in your email marketing campaign could be hindering it.
Short Checklist On Fixing Email Deliverability Issues
Legitimate email marketers are finding it more and more difficult to reach the inboxes of their subscribers due to service providers taking increased action against spammers. If you want to have good email deliverability, then you should follow the best practices in email marketing.
Here is a brief checklist that will help you resolve your email deliverability concerns:
Assess the Source of your Mailing List
The root of your email deliverability problem comes from your mailing list. As mentioned earlier, you want to avoid buying, harvesting, or renting email addresses. It’s best to get rid of an email list that has been built by a third-party service provider. Instead, you should build your own mailing list and have users opt-in to receive your emails.
When you delegate your email address collection to a service provider, you don’t have control over the whole process. You also don’t know whether they obtained it through legitimate or shady means.
That’s why the first thing you should do to find the cause of your low email delivery rate is to look at your mailing list. If you gathered your emails through organic and opt-in methods, then you’re good to go. If not, then you should delete it and start a new one from scratch to avoid problems.
Keep an Eye On Your Email Content
There was a time when certain words or phrases were heavily filtered by ISPs and mailbox providers that they would send an email containing these terms straight to the junk folder.
Although this is far from the only factor ISPs use to determine spam today, your content still plays a vital role in your deliverability. This is especially true since it relates to your sending reputation.
You want to keep an eye on the content you incorporate in your emails by running a spam filter test on it. Doing this test before you send it out can help you identify potential words that could make your email appear spam-like to anti-spam entities.
Incorporate Light HTML In Your Emails
Most mailbox providers consider emails that have rich HTML coding to be for commercial purposes. These messages are usually filtered out, making it hard for you to reach the inbox if you’re using this approach.
Instead, marketers are now using light HTML formatting with their email marketing messages. They also avoid adding images because it could mean the difference between landing in the inbox or the spam folder.
Additionally, it can be difficult to have images show up the right way on mobile devices. Making sure your emails are mobile-friendly is now more important than ever, especially with more people using smart devices nowadays.
Incorporate an Unsubscribe Link In Your Messages
Another critical indication that a sender is a spammer is when they don’t include an unsubscribe link in their emails. Not providing recipients with a way to unsubscribe from your mailing list will often result in them clicking the “mark as spam” button instead.
But providing an unsubscribe link isn’t enough on its own. You should make sure that these links are prominently displayed in your emails. Although this may sound counterproductive, keep in mind that unsubscribing is less harmful compared to receiving spam complaints.
However, this doesn’t mean that you should settle if you find that many people are unsubscribing from your list. Anti-spam entities will see this as a sign that there’s something wrong with your email campaigns.
To avoid this outcome, send a survey to your readers and ask them whether they want to continue receiving emails from you or not. You should also ask them what type of content they like to receive, how frequently they’d like it, and if they’d be willing to stay engaged if you provide it to them.
Reduce Your Spam Complaint Rate
One of the best ways you can reduce your spam complaint rate is to send emails that your subscribers signed up for. Using a confirmed opt-in procedure in capturing subscribers is a great way of doing this.
You can also ask your recipients to add your email address or whitelist it. This can help mailbox providers recognize that your messages are valuable, minimizing the probability that they’ll get snagged by spam filters.
How MailMonitor Can Help Your Emails Reach the Inbox
Email deliverability plays a crucial role in inbox placement. When you improve email deliverability, your messages have a better chance to reach the inboxes of your subscribers.
With MailMonitor, you have a suite of tools that are designed for testing, monitoring, and fixing inbox placement problems you might be facing. It provides users with everything they need to track their email deliverability and even their sender reputation.
The main features that MailMonitor offers are:
- Reputation tracking: Any changes that your email marketing campaign experiences can have a negative effect on how your emails are displayed upon being sent out. MailMonitor lets you keep track of your reputation so that you can remedy any issues before they get worse.
- Worldwide inbox monitoring: Two of the monitoring features provided by the MailMonitor suite are Open Tracking and the ability to display deliverability insights on popular inbox providers.
- Spam filter testing: Are you wondering whether your emails have the proper authentication protocols in place for them to pass the screening of inbox providers and anti-spam organizations? With MailMonitor, you can track and address all spam complaints that were issued against you immediately.
- Preview and measure: The suite comes with a list of preview and testing tools that will improve the speed of your team’s workflow. It also ensures a more seamless approach for troubleshooting concerns.
- Blocklist monitoring: Email marketers regularly use MailMonitor to monitor the IP address of their domains to ensure they haven’t been added to any blacklists. If they do, the suite offers tools to address such problems.
- Deliverability auditing: The team behind MailMonitor can carry out a comprehensive audit of your sender reputation, email marketing best practices, and overall infrastructure. This audit will provide you with the means to assess which areas in your strategy need improvement.
Conclusion
The ROI of your email marketing campaigns is the best indication you can get of how successful and effective they are in reaching their target audiences. That’s why it’s important to know whether or not your messages can reach the inbox.
Although there are ways for mailbox providers to let users know if their messages were received or not, these aren’t as reliable as one would hope. Using an email marketing platform that can provide you with the tools you need to monitor email inbox placement offers a better alternative.
MailMonitor offers email marketers a suite of features that can help them keep track of their email deliverability. It provides tools such as spam filter monitoring, reputation tracking, worldwide inbox monitoring, deliverability auditing, and more.
All of the tools provided by MailMonitor are designed to help marketers track their capability to reach the inbox and their target recipients.
If you’re looking for the best email marketing platform to improve your email deliverability, consider leveraging the features offered by MailMonitor today.
