7 Best Practices to Maintain Deliverability
Email deliverability is the foundation for your email marketing. If your email doesn’t reach the inbox, it’s DOA (dead on arrival)!
To improve your email deliverability rates and ensure your messages are seen by your audience, it is essential to follow some best practices.
What is Email Deliverability?
Email deliverability is the measure of how successfully an email reaches its intended recipients' inboxes. It encompasses various factors that determine whether an email will make it past spam filters, bounce back, or land in the inbox where it belongs.
Elements such as sender reputation, email content, IP address reputation, domain authentication, and subscriber engagement all play a crucial role in the email deliverability process.
High deliverability ensures that the emails we send actually reach the individuals we intend to communicate with, maximizing the effectiveness of our messages and fostering stronger connections with our audience.
1. Build a Clean and Engaged Email List
Maintaining a clean and engaged email list is the cornerstone of good deliverability.
Incorporating regular hygiene practices that remove invalid or inactive email addresses from your database will help continuously maintain your database.
Apart from regular hygiene, asking for an unsubscribe can help ensure your list is active and engaged. If you can identify which people are interested in actually spending money, you maximize your email ROI.
“Much of the answer has to do with how many of our readers are not ideal customers… if you biff lousy prospects in the right way, you simultaneously improve the quality of good prospects.” Unbounce
Growing your subscriber list is another important factor for email marketing success. Leveraging data providers and providing relevant content to consumers is a great place to start.
2. Use a Reputable Email Service Provider (ESP)
Choosing a reputable Email Service Provider (ESP) is vital for successful email delivery. ESPs have dedicated resources and relationships with internet service providers (ISPs) to help improve deliverability rates. Select an ESP that offers features like DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), SPF (Sender Policy Framework), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) to authenticate your emails and enhance their chances of reaching the inbox.
3. Craft Emails that Your Customers Actually Want to Read
Email personalization is key to high deliverability. When scoring domain reputation, ESPs monitor details of your content for spam filters when delivering your message.
Creating engaging and relevant email content not only increases the chances of high open rates, click-through rates, and positive subscriber interactions, but also increases domain reputation. An engaging email makes for a positive impact on every ESP.
“Content (i.e. the articles, recommendations, offers, and copy you send to subscribers) is a huge part of how you develop your relationship with your subscribers. In fact, 81% of marketing leaders put content at the core of marketing.” - CampaignMonitor
Personalize your emails based on the recipient's preferences, send behavior-triggered messages, and segment your list to tailor your content effectively.
Behavior-triggered emails in particular are a great way to deliver relevant content in a timely manner. Utilizing insights from AWI’s Web Intent Data can enable businesses to act accordingly.
For example, a window treatment company could select consumers who searched for “blinds and shutters” and send a triggered email campaign on this select. As these consumers are in the market for these products, the company will have a higher chance on converting these prospects.
4. Optimize Email Design for Different Devices and Email Clients
Design your email templates to be mobile-responsive and compatible for various email clients and devices.
This entails adopting responsive design principles that allow the email layout to adapt and scale smoothly across various screen sizes. It's also essential to carefully choose fonts and font sizes that are easily legible on smaller screens.
“Nearly 1.7 billion users check emails on their mobile phones, which has royally outnumbered the data for desktop, which is around 0.9 billion users.” — EasySendy
Designing with a mobile-first approach will allow you to maximize the effectiveness of your emails campaigns and engage with users across all devices.
Regardless of the device users are using, its best to keep your email design concise and clutter-free to improve readability and engagement. Think about it. The less in your email, the higher the chance users will actually click your CTA.
A well-designed email is more likely to be opened, read, and interacted with by recipients.
5. Monitor and Analyze Email Performance
We analyze email campaigns for their success, but its important to regularly monitor and analyze your email performance to identify any deliverability issues.
Track metrics like open rates, bounce rates, spam complaints, and unsubscribe rates to gauge the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Address any problems promptly to maintain a high sender reputation, which is crucial for email deliverability.
Not sure what your current sender reputation is? Sender score offers a free domain assessment here.
6. Avoid Spam Traps
The number one takeaway from this article to maintain deliverability? Don’t hit a spam trap!
“A spam trap is an email address maintained by an internet service provider, or spam monitoring service. The email address is never clicked or opened, which means that it doesn’t actively engage with any emails it receives.” - Andrews Wharton
When an email sender unknowingly sends emails to these traps, it sends a signal to internet service providers (ISPs) that the sender may be engaging in spammy practices. This can result in the sender's emails being blocked or sent to spam folders, leading to a decrease in the deliverability of their emails.
By avoiding spam traps, email marketers can ensure that their messages reach the intended recipients and maintain a positive sender reputation. It is essential to regularly clean email lists, use double opt-ins, and follow proper email marketing practices to minimize the risk of hitting spam traps.
7. Test Emails Before Sending
Testing your email campaign prior to the official deployment can identify potential issues that may hinder successful delivery to recipients’ inboxes.
Checking spam filters, testing rendering on various devices, and inbox placement tests are just some of the preliminary tests we recommend conducting before hitting send. Or you could partner with us to test and deploy your emails safely.
By regularly testing emails, we can optimize email content, formatting, and authentication protocols, thus enhancing deliverability rates and ensuring that our messages reach the intended recipients.
Successful Email Campaigns Start with AWI
From hygiene to deployment, AWI’s Email Suite is the end-to-end solution to give you the insights and deliverability you’ve been reaching for.
With data-driven project requirements, Andrews Wharton is the proven direct-response solutions provider with a long-standing reputation for solving your toughest email marketing challenges.
Are you ready to get started? We are.
Success. Delivered.
