Best Tips to Easily Improve Email Deliverability

Deploying an effective marketing campaign is not easy. You have to create engaging content and target the right audience. You also have to keep your mailing lists clean and avoid spam filters. In a nutshell, you have to do your best to improve your email deliverability.

Why is email deliverability so important?

To outsiders, email marketing may seem outdated given the popularity of social media marketing. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, as seasoned marketers will tell you, email marketing still beats everything else under the sun. It’s one of the most efficient lead conversion mechanisms, yielding the highest ROI. In fact, most (all?) successful brands use email marketing in one form or another.

Email marketing still beats everything and is one of the most efficient lead conversion mechanisms, with highest ROI.Click To Tweet

Hence, it’s clear that email marketing is great for businesses. But what about the subscribers? What happens when they start receiving too much content? You might have guessed the answer: they’ll either delete the email upon reading your subject line, unsubscribe, or mark your emails as spam.

To top this off, mailbox providers actively take measures to keep their user inboxes free from clutter.  Spam filters screen incoming emails to determine which ones deserve to reach the inbox. The less important emails go to other folders, straight to junk or get outright rejected.

If any of the above happens to your emails, it can jeopardize your entire campaign. Even if you have a great product or offer huge discounts, it won’t matter. Low deliverability rates equal low campaign success.

Best Practices to Easily Improve Email Deliverability
 

What affects your deliverability rates?

The concept of deliverability is multifaceted. It depends on a number of factors, including you (the sender), your subscribers and your ESP (email service provider). Let’s look at some of the main factors that can influence your inbox placement.

Bouncing

Simply put, this means the server has rejected your email. Soft bounces are caused by temporary delivery issues, such as a full inbox or large message size. Hard bouncing means the mail is permanently undeliverable. This happens with invalid addresses or wrong domain names. 

Email content

The content of your emails is an important factor in deliverability. This includes attached files, subject lines, links, quality, and relevancy. Spammy subject lines, lots of exclamation points, $$ signs or WRITING IN ALL CAPS is a bad idea.

Sender reputation

Sender reputation describes your level of credibility as a sender. The number of spam complaints, blacklist listings, and bounce rates all affect your sender reputation. Other criteria include the number of unsubscribes, spam trap hits and email volume changes. User engagement (open, read and response rate) is also an important factor.

Authentication

Email providers make great efforts to prevent unsolicited email from reaching their users. To confirm that you are who you claim to be, the ESP performs an authentication check. If you fail the check, the messages will either be categorized as spam or rejected.

Authentication helps fight email forging, where fraudulent mail is sent by seemingly legitimate senders. As a result, people are tricked into giving out sensitive personal and financial information.

Email Screen - Spam

Things you can do to improve email deliverability

Use confirmed opt-ins

When you subscribe to content, you need to sign up and submit certain details. In single opt-ins, this is all it takes to finalize the subscription. In confirmed opt-ins, you must also click a confirmation link sent to the address you’ve supplied. Use confirmed opt-ins to make sure people really want to receive your content.

Be careful with images

From a marketing point of view, using images in emails is eye-catching and boosts conversion rates. But you have to do it right to avoid spam filters. Emails consisting of many images and little text or a single large image are often flagged as spam. This is because, in the past, spammers used this approach to bypass spam filters (mainly based on keywords).

Keep in mind that many ESPs block images by default. They do this in order to protect their users. If your email consists mostly of images, people will only see an empty page with blank boxes instead of images. This is simply not engaging content.

Pay attention to content

The rule is simple: no spammy-looking content. Choose your text, subject lines, layout, colors and overall design wisely.

Avoid using spam-sounding words, phrases like free, great offer, congratulations, you’re the winner. Don’t use all caps or too many exclamation points.

To do the job right, you can use spam checking software to score your content before sending it. Emercury’s spam checker helps you detect possible deliverability issues, so you can fix them and check again.

Quality content equals better engagement. This, in turn, signals your ISP that your emails are good and deserve to go straight to that inbox.

Quality content equals better engagement. This tells the ISP that your emails deserve to go straight to the inbox.Click To Tweet

Use good image-to-text ratio. This way, even if the images get blocked, there’ll still be enough text to get the message across. Make sure to use “alt text”. This is the text that appears when images are disabled.

Online newsletter mail concept with a close up angled view of a newsletter key

Set autoresponders

Automated emails are a valuable and practical customer communication tool.  They help you interact with your customers, build loyalty and stimulate sales.

Automated emails are a valuable tool to help you interact with your customers, build loyalty and stimulate sales.Click To Tweet

Use autoresponders to thank people for subscribing and confirm subs and unsubs. You can also use them to follow up with your subscribers in preset intervals.

Emercury’s event-based autoresponder helps you schedule email delivery based on user actions. With this personalized approach, you can send email based on different triggers; For instance, when the subscriber opens the email, clicks a link or fills out a form to receive content.

You can even go a step further and set auto-responses based on different clicks within a previously opened email or other campaigns.

Stay CAN-SPAM compliant

The CAN-SPAM Act is a U.S. law that sets out rules for commercial email content. The law applies to all commercial emails, not just bulk mail. It also imposes considerable fines for violations.

Among other things, the Act stipulates the following:

  • senders must include an opt-out method, such as unsubscribe link
  • unsub requests must be processed promptly
  • opt-out methods must remain active for at least 30 days after sending
  • commercial emails must include the postal address of the sender
  • senders must identify themselves in the message header

The CAN-SPAM Act prohibits using deceptive subject lines. Also, senders must clearly state that the email is an advertisement.

If you use an email marketing platform for your campaigns, choose one that guarantees full compliance of all outgoing emails.

Include a visible unsubscribe link

You surely don’t want to see people unsubscribing from your lists. But it’s still better than people marking your emails as spam. Remember, the number of spam hits is one of the key factors affecting your reputation and deliverability rates.

Choose software that can improve email deliverability in no time

Choose the right email marketing service

There are hundreds of email marketing platforms out there. If you’re smart though, you realize that you need the one that ensures high deliverability rates for all of your campaigns. You might even say we’re famous for being “obsessed with delivery management”. That’s entirely to your benefit.

Emercury can help you increase email deliverability. Use the service to create beautiful personalized emails that best portray your products. Or enjoy the ability to manage triggered emails and high volume mailing.

Emercury’s list hygiene tools make it easy to purge invalid addresses and inactive emails. This will keep your bounce rates low, help you maintain a good sender reputation and result in high deliverability rates.

What are some ways you are implementing to get better delivery? Let me know in the comments and please share this article if you found it valuable 😉

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