Marketing experts agree that email marketing still remains one of the most powerful as well as cost-effective channels for engaging prospective customers. They also agree that, unfortunately, deliverability remains a problem and cite the fact that even permission-based, relevant emails are still often being filtered out.
In fact, when it comes to permission-based emails, 14% of them in North America and 22% worldwide actually never make it into a recipient’s inbox. While these numbers are alarmingly high, any good marketer will tell you that even one email not making it into an inbox is one email to many.
With that in mind we put together a number of deliverability solutions and tactics that marketers can use to make sure that the majority of their emails actually make it into an inbox.
First, it goes without saying that you should only send emails to contacts that expected to receive them. These would include customers, of course, but also partners and anyone who has opted-in to your email mailing list. This means that purchasing or renting lists isn’t advisable and, in fact, can sometimes lead to a negative impact on your company’s reputation.
Keep in mind that even if a recipient is expecting your email, if you’ve promised to deliver them one per week and you start delivering substantially more than that you could find that many names on your list will soon decide to opt out. In fact, if your plan includes sending a lot of emails, it’s advisable to use a subscription management option so that they can opt out of receiving certain types without having to opt out of your email program completely.
Properly maintaining your email list is also a vital task that needs to be performed regularly. Keeping it free of invalid, mistyped or undeliverable email addresses is extremely important, obviously, and this will keep your list as clean as possible with only high quality addresses.
If you’re not monitoring your response rates you should be. It not only will help you to keep track of campaign performance but improve deliverability as well. Keeping track of your delivery rates, hard and soft bounces, complaints, unsubscribes, CTR and opens is vital in order to be able to spot patterns and respond to them. It’s also one of the best to investigate sudden drop-offs and make adjustments to them before your delete rates skyrocket and reputation suffers.
Next is to make sure that you are focusing on subscribers that are engaged, especially since ISPs are now using engagement in their spam filtering process. Focusing, for example, on customers that responded to a recent email is one way to do that.
It goes without saying in this content crazy era that creating relevant and engaging emails is vital to your email campaign’s success. Emails that offer high quality, relevant, helpful or at least entertaining content will be opened and read much more often than those that don’t.