Email marketing has gained a foothold in the commercial world and keeps growing as more people buy into the idea. Small, medium and large businesses visit platforms to increase their knowledge of email marketing and exploit the opportunities it offers. However, email deliverability becomes an issue, with everyone vying for a spot on the billions of email accounts worldwide.
What is Email Deliverability?
Email deliverability refers to the ability of emails to land in the recipients’ inboxes and not any other folders. Email deliverability is often confused with email delivery, but there is a difference between the two.
Email delivery means that an email was successfully sent to the recipient and did not bounce. However, such email may end up in an unwanted place such as the spam folder, promotional folder, and other such folders ESPs have created to segment emails.
Email deliverability, therefore, refers to emails being delivered right into recipients’ inboxes. That way, it is sure that the recipients received the email. Whether or not they read it is another issue entirely.
Why Does Email Deliverability Matter?
As the world of email marketing grows, marketers are looking for more ways to position their brands in the audience’s spotlight. With the spotlight, also known as the inbox, being a competitive space, marketers have to leverage email deliverability best practices to achieve their goals fully. For anyone still out of the loop, here are some reasons email deliverability matters.
Email Deliverability is the Core to Email Marketing
Your well-crafted email campaigns will do you no good if they do not reach your audience. Email marketing hinges on people receiving your emails and taking desired actions. Therefore, succeeding in email deliverability is the first of many goals email marketers set for their brands.
The email space is competitive.
Billions of emails are sent daily within the business and personal spaces. As an email marketer, you have to compete with these crops of emails your audience receives every day. The way to survive is to ensure that your email is delivered to the recipients’ inboxes, increasing their chances of reading the emails.
The Audience is the Priority
The goal of email deliverability is to present recipients with only the emails they will be interested in reading. Therefore, you have to work on your deliverability by ensuring that you satisfy your recipients’ preferences in terms of content type, size, and frequency.
Factors That Affect Email Deliverability
Many tools now exist to track email delivery rates, but there is little success in measuring email deliverability. The algorithms of these tools calculate the number of emails delivered against those bounced. However, knowing where the email lands are not so easy. Therefore, you must know the factors that affect your email deliverability and how they impact your email campaign.
Your Identification
Email authentication is vital to have good deliverability. Email Service Providers (ESPs) use a set of protocols to identify you and confirm that you are who you claim to be. These protocols help to protect email users from spammers and scammers. If you do not authenticate your email, you may experience deliverability issues if service providers identify you as a spammer.
Your Sender Reputation
If your sender reputation/score is low, your emails have a higher chance of falling out of the inboxes. Service providers will notice how many of your emails bounce and what action the delivered ones inspire from the audience. Conversely, if your stats are bad, it increases the chance of your email ending up in the spam or promotional folder.
Quality of Your Content
Always give your audience what they want. If your content is not what your audience wants, you will experience low engagement. Consequently, this will affect your stats, nudging you out of the race for the inbox.
How to Improve Email Deliverability
The next thing is to know how to improve the email deliverability of your campaign. Again, these ideas will help you improve your email deliverability so pay close attention to them.
Maintain a healthy mailing list
Regularly clean up your mailing list by removing inactive subscribers and suspicious emails. These accounts are the ones that do not receive your emails and give you a bad sender reputation. Having a good sender reputation is one of the first steps to email deliverability. The usage of an accurate email verifier is a must-have to maintain email list hygiene.
Monitor inactive subscribers
Check your stats often to know which subscribers don’t open your emails or engage with your content. If their actions persist, you might want to remove them from your mailing list.
Use custom authentication
Authentication is crucial, so you should use custom authentication that makes both the service provider and audience distinguish your account.
Adopt double opt-in
Single opt-in allows incorrect and inactive email addresses to slip into your mailing list. Using double opt-in will send a message to email addresses, and recipients typically have to click to subscribe to your mailing list. You can look up some SaaS welcome email templates to see how they work.
Or you can simply use an email checker or any other list cleaning software solution before sending emails in bulk to ensure all addresses are correct and to avoid bounced emails.
Make it easy to unsubscribe
Put the unsubscribe button in a conspicuous place to make it easy for subscribers to opt-out when they are no longer interested in your services. This action will allow them to leave peacefully rather than mark your emails as spam.
Send high-quality email
Quality is king, and you should always strive to give your audience what they want. Check some SaaS welcome email examples to see how to make your audience feel at home with your campaign.
Conclusion
Email deliverability is essential to email marketing campaigns, and marketers must understand its nuances to succeed. Once you know how it works, you only have to adopt the proper practices to position yourself favorably in the competitive email marketing space.