Understanding the Nitty-gritty of Email Deliverability. As an email marketer, a lot goes into crafting an impeccable email. From the subject line and the content to email template designs and fonts, email developers do it all to give your subscribers a seamless customer experience. However, even after so much of hard work, 21% of emails never get delivered to the recipient’s inbox. So, no matter how great your email is, if it doesn’t reach the customer’s inbox, it is worthless.
This is where email deliverability can come in handy. It is a critical metric of any email marketing campaign that displays the total number of emails that reached the customer’s inbox.
However, while measuring the email deliverability rate, it is critical to understand that email deliverability is different from email delivery. While email delivery happens when an email is successfully delivered to the receiving server, email deliverability takes place when an email arrives in the customer’s inbox.
Why is it important to track email deliverability?
Now, since you know what email deliverability is all about, let’s see why it is critical to analyze email deliverability.
- It lets you know if subscribers have received your email or not
Analyzing email deliverability lets you identify subscribers who opened your email along with the time of opening it. This, in turn, can help you extract useful insights regarding your subscribers. From finding out the most active subscribers to discovering the factors which boost engagement, you can get hold of it all through email deliverability analysis.
- It helps you determine if a lead is hot or not
Email deliverability rates can help you in identifying such leads who are most qualified while keeping a check on leads that require nurturing. Once you find out both the leads, you can send the hot leads to the sales team and refer warm leads to the marketing team.
- It assists in identifying referrals
Referrals are a great way of boosting the confidence of prospective customers to reach out to your brand. Email deliverability has the ability to determine the past and existing loyal customers. It can help you in enticing them with such offers and services that would appeal to the referred customers the same way it did to your previous customers.
- It gives an idea about the reason for unsubscribes
Keeping a check on email deliverability can help you in understanding the reason for unsubscribes. For example, if you witness a sudden increase in the unsubscribe rate, you can analyze the email strategy and find out common reasons such as broken links, issues with content, and so on.
- It helps you know if the email content is resonating with customers or not
Email deliverability gives a precise insight into the way subscribers interact with your email content, thereby helping you understand how well your email campaign is performing and take corrective measures if needed.
What are the factors affecting email deliverability?
Email deliverability is greatly affected by sender reputation, email infrastructure, and authentication. Let’s take a close look at it.
- Sender reputation
Sender reputation is a score that’s assigned to a sender on the basis of the email campaign quality, the frequency of sending the emails, and the user’s interaction with the email. Simply put, it helps in determining whether the email service providers will deliver a particular email to the user’s inbox or not. You can improve your sender reputation by warming up your IP address at the outset itself.
- Email infrastructure
Email infrastructure is a system that helps in speeding up the delivery of newsletters and transactional emails. Here’s a look at few of the email infrastructural aspects that can affect email deliverability:
- IP address
It plays a great role in sender reputation. Your email service provider keeps a track of all the actions you take back to the IP and gives you a reputation score based on these. In this context, opting for a dedicated IP is a preferred option. It makes sure your sender reputation depends solely on your own actions, thereby reducing the chances of your email landing into the spam folder.
- Feedback loop
A feedback loop gives you an insight into how your subscribers interacted with your email. This, in turn, will help you remove poorly engaged subscribers and make sure that your content is completely relevant to your audience base.
- Authentication
Authentication is a process that gives email service providers the ability to verify if the IP address of a marketer has permission to send emails or not. As a result, it helps in improving the email deliverability while reducing the spam.
Best practices to improve email deliverability
You can make your email deliverability rates better by following the below mentioned best practices. Take a look.
- Never buy an email list
Buying an email list can be bad for your brand and sender reputation. This happens because the people on that list didn’t opt-in to receive your emails. So, the chances of them marking it as spam becomes more when they receive it. It might even lead to the violation of your email service provider’s terms of service. This, in turn, can get your account shut. So, it’s better to build an email list organically rather than purchasing it.
- Give your subscribers the option to manage preferences
With 43% of people marking emails as spam because they don’t find it easy to unsubscribe, it becomes imperative to make managing preferences easy for your subscribers. Simply put, when you give subscribers a choice, it can help you in retaining them on your list, thereby improving your email deliverability considerably.
From deciding to receive emails less often to pausing the emails for a while, an email preference centre can help your subscribers do it all. See how Beta List does a good job by letting them know that they have removed the email address from the list while giving them an option to subscribe again.
Source: Really Good Emails
Here’s another example from Auto Trader which makes use of a preference centre like a pro.
Source: Really Good Emails
- Send email to your most engaged users
You can improve your sender reputation and email deliverability by encouraging more people to read and click-through your email. You can do so by targeting your most engaged subscribers and designing campaigns specifically tailored to them. Do it the way Canopy does in its email template by providing relevant and personalized content to their users.
Source: Really Good Emails
- Make sure you have a clean email list
Cleaning your email list regularly is another important aspect of better email deliverability. It helps you keep your subscriber list full of interested and engaged subscribers while getting rid of the uninterested or inactive ones. So, go ahead and filter out such subscribers who haven’t opened or clicked on your emails in a few months. In addition, you must keep a check on invalid email addresses to reduce your email bounce rate.
Wrap up
Email marketing can do wonders for your business and ROI. However, it would be possible only when your emails get delivered. So, go ahead and improve your email deliverability while making your email marketing effective.
From increasing your revenue and driving up your engagement, you can achieve it all by following the best email deliverability practices mentioned above.