Do you want to learn how to improve your email deliverability rate? If so, you're in the right place! Email deliverability is an important metric for any email marketing campaign.
Put plainly, this metric will show you how many of your marketing emails are delivered versus how many you send. Ideally, you want as many people as possible to receive your emails because that means more opportunities to connect with your audience. For context, nearly 16% of all emails sent are not delivered for one reason or another.
In this post, I'll share 6 tips for increasing your email deliverability rate so you can get more emails to subscribers' inboxes.
Let's get started!
Do Not Purchase Email Lists
The first thing you should do is never purchase email lists. This might look like an easy and fast way to increase your coverage, but the effects of this action are not worth it.
By sending unsolicited emails to unsuspecting individuals, you will end up with many people marking your emails as spam. When you get enough spam complaints from your subscribers, this will damage your sender reputation, which will make it harder and harder for your email to land in any recipient's inbox, not only the ones who marked you as spam.
So, instead of taking this unethical shortcut, you should concentrate your efforts on building an organic email list. Offer valuable content, like blog posts, to your target audience so you can make sure that the people who subscribe to your list are really interested in your brand and business.
I'd argue this will always result in a higher email deliverability rate and more engaged subscribers when compared to buying an email list.
Use Double Opt-Ins to Confirm Interest
Double opt-ins can help you increase your email deliverability and engage your audience. This method involves a two-step verification process that subscribers must take to join your email list. Usually, this verification process involves clicking a link in your welcome email.
Since new subscribers have to prove that they are genuinely interested in your brand by confirming their subscription, you can ensure that your email list is full of interested and potential customers.
We found that this step decreases spam complaints, increases engagement, and improves overall sender reputation, all of which lead to a higher email deliverability rate.
Establish Expectations and Keep Your Promises
From the moment a user joins your email list, you should keep in mind that they showed interest in a particular offer that you most likely presented in the form of a lead magnet or coupon. So, the first email that you send to these new subscribers should start with this offer, and you should fulfill the interest that you sparked in them in order to make sure that they will not unsubscribe in the future or stop reading your emails.
The next step you should take is to clearly tell your subscribers what kind of content you will send them in the future. For instance, send an email to your new subscribers telling them that every month, you will send a digest with relevant posts from your blog and also ask them for suggestions related to what topics they are more interested in.
By setting expectations and doing what you said you would do, you will show your subscribers that you are committed to sending them personalized and relevant content. Want to know how this can help you? Consider this: 80% of shoppers say they're more likely to engage with brands if they share relevant content and promotions.
Test Your Emails
A great way to make sure that your emails look great and work as intended is to test them. This step will increase your chances of getting your emails read by subscribers because your content will look great across all devices, including laptops, smartphones, and tablets.
You should keep in mind that around 70% of people own a mobile device, and the majority of them use their phones to check for new emails. So, if your email is not properly displayed or functions poorly on these devices, your subscribers will most likely not come back to it later from a desktop computer.
So, to avoid this situation, you should get in the habit of testing your emails before sending them. Send a test email to yourself and members of your marketing team using different devices, simulate smartphone rendering using browser extensions or similar tools, or use professional testing services that will optimize your emails for multiple platforms.
Consistent testing can really increase your return on investment -- for us, it resulted in an average 28% increase in our campaigns!
Let Your Subscribers Manage Their Preferences
Letting your subscribers manage their email preferences is another sure way to make them happy and engaged. We all like to surround ourselves with people and businesses that allow two-way conversations, so your subscribers want to have a say in the kind of emails they get from you and their frequency.
You should ask your new subscribers about their preferences during the subscription process, but don't stop there. In each email you send, you should include a section where subscribers can easily manage their preferences whenever they want. If a subscriber is getting too many emails from you, they can simply change the frequency and not unsubscribe from all of your email lists.
By giving them this ease and freedom, you will retain subscribers who will still open your emails and engage with your business, which is a key element in maintaining a high email deliverability rate.
Scrub Your List
No matter how much effort you put into your business, there will always be subscribers who become inactive and stop opening your emails. After a targeted campaign to re-engage them, if there is no change, you should consider removing inactive subscribers from your list---a process called list scrubbing.
This is an important practice you should do regularly to maintain high email deliverability rates. Imagine that your list increases by 1,000 new subscribers each month, but 300 of them become inactive in the next month. In a year, you would have 12,000 new subscribers but also 3,600 inactive.
You want as many happy and engaged subscribers as possible to open your emails each time you send one because this tells email service providers that your reputation is clean and your messages are reputable and valuable for your subscribers.
So, by scrubbing your list each quarter or every six months, you will ensure that only people who are currently interested in your brand receive your emails, which will result in a higher open rate and better email deliverability.
Before you delete inactive subscribers, you can send them a "last call" email asking them to reconfirm their interest in receiving marketing emails from you. If they fail to respond within a week or so, you can safely delete them from your list.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, there are many things that you can do to increase your email deliverability rates and ensure that your emails land in your subscribers' inboxes. During this process, you should constantly check your email analytics and make changes based on your target audience. Before long, you should be able to understand and reduce your email deliverability rate.
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