11 Pro Tips to Maximize Your Email Deliverability
An email marketing campaign is one of the most inexpensive ways to reach a wide audience. However, there’s a lot more that goes into writing an email and bcc-ing it. You need to make sure your email deliverability is on point.
Email deliverability measures how effectively an email marketing campaign reaches an audience. There are several hurdles that lead to failed attempts, including spam filters and email bounce. So, if you want to increase engagement and conversion, you should follow these pro tips to maximize your email deliverability.
1. Establishing a Strong Email Reputation
Your sender’s reputation decides if your emails go to someone’s inbox or get marked as spam. It shows email services that your emails are good and people like them. This reputation is affected by how often you send emails if people open and read them, and if they mark them as spam.
Using a tool like Mailreach can significantly enhance and maintain your sender reputation. It checks how you send emails and finds problems that might worsen your reputation. With Mailreach, you can ensure you’re sending emails the right way and help your emails get to the people you want to reach.
2. Warming Up Your Email Account
Email warmup is something you should do when you start sending out emails for a new marketing campaign or with a new email account. It means you slowly send more and more emails from this new account to build a good reputation for sending emails. This way, you send emails like a regular person and don’t suddenly send a bunch at once, which could make email services think you’re sending spam.
Doing an email warmup makes email services trust you more, so your emails are more likely to end up in people’s inboxes instead of their spam folders. You can see how people react to your first emails and make changes if needed.
3. Crafting Compelling Content and Subject Lines
Good content and interesting email titles are really important for email marketing to work well. The stuff you write in your email should be useful, interesting, and fit what the people you’re sending it to want to know. It’s about the words you use and how you say them.
Email subject lines are super important, too, because they’re the first thing people see. They should be short, clear, and grab attention so people want to open your email. A cool way to make your content and titles better is to do A/B testing. This means you send two versions of your email to a small group and see which one people like more.
An example of A/B testing is:
- Email A has a subject line, “Exciting Sale: 50% Off All Items!”
- Email B uses, “Limited Time Offer: Save Big on Your Favorites!”
- You send these to a small group of your audience.
- Track which email gets more opens or clicks. You can tell which is better by checking how many people open and engage with each version.
4. Maintaining List Hygiene and Segmenting Your Audience
Keeping your email list clean is important for your email marketing to work well. You should often check and remove the email addresses of people who don’t respond or aren’t inactive. This helps make sure your emails get to people who are interested and want to read them, which makes your email campaigns do better.
Another smart move is to organize your email list into different groups.
- Geographic Location: A group of subscribers based on where they live, useful for location-specific offers or events.
- Purchase History: A group who has bought certain products, great for targeted follow-up offers or related product promotions.
- Engagement Level: A group of active readers (frequent openers) from less active ones, allowing tailored content to re-engage or reward active subscribers.
- Age Group: Organize subscribers by age range for age-appropriate marketing and product suggestions.
- Interest Categories: A list based on interests indicated in sign-up forms or through website activity, enabling personalized content that resonates with each group’s preferences.
Also, if you have a list of recipients who no longer open your emails, you can try to get their attention again with re-engagement campaigns. Use interesting content and special offers to make them interested in your brand again and start reading your emails.
5. Implementing Double Opt-In and Permission-Based Marketing
The double opt-in process is like a two-step check to ensure someone wants your emails. First, someone gives their email address, maybe on a website where they sign up. Then, they get an email with a link they need to click to say, “Yes, I want these emails.” This ensures the person wants your emails and helps stop spam complaints.
Getting clear permission from people means they’re looking forward to your emails. When people say they want your emails clearly, they’re more likely to open and click on them. This way of doing things is not just following the rules of good email marketing; it also helps build trust and a good relationship between your brand and the recipients.
6. Performing Email Spam Tests
A spam test involves sending a version of your email to different test email accounts to see how they handle it. This helps you find out if anything in your email might make it get marked as spam, like certain words, special phrases, or the way it’s put together.
Here’s a brief guide on how to conduct an email spam test:
Prepare Your Email: Create the email you want to test, complete with the subject line and content.
- Choose a Spam Testing Tool: Choose a trusted email spam test service.
- Send Your Email to the Test Tool: Use the email address provided by the spam testing tool to send your test email.
- Analyze the Report: Once the tool processes your email, review the report it generates for spam triggers.
- Make Adjustments: Based on the report, modify any elements in your email that are flagged as potential spam.
- Retest if Necessary: After making changes, consider retesting the email to ensure all spam triggers have been addressed.
If you keep doing these spam tests, you can determine if your emails are more likely to go to people’s inboxes or end up in the spam folder. The tests give you useful info about different parts of your email, like the subject line, what you write in it, and how it looks. This way, you can make changes if needed.
7. Optimizing Email Design and Formatting
Making your emails look and work right is super important for ensuring they get delivered and that people like reading them. One big thing is to make sure your emails work well on phones since many people read emails on their mobile devices. This means using well-designed designs that are easy to read on any screen size.
Having a good mix of text and pictures in your emails is also a good idea. If you use too many pictures, your email might get marked as spam or not show up right if someone’s email app doesn’t show pictures. Plus, using easy-to-read fonts and a simple design helps prevent any weird formatting problems.
8. Monitoring Email Metrics and Adapting Strategies
Email metrics provided by an email tracker give good clues about how your emails are doing. If lots of people are opening your emails, it probably means your email titles are interesting and the stuff you’re writing about is something they want to read.
Some of the more important email metrics include:
- Open Rate: Measures the percentage of recipients who opened your email. Indicates the effectiveness of your subject line and the interest level in your content.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): The proportion of email recipients who clicked on one or more links contained in an email. Shows how engaging your email content and call-to-actions are.
- Bounce Rate: The percentage of emails that couldn’t be delivered to the recipient’s inbox. High bounce rates may indicate problems with your email list quality.
- Unsubscribe Rate: Tracks how many people opted out of your email list after receiving an email. Helps gauge overall recipient satisfaction and relevance of your content.
- Conversion Rate: The percentage of email recipients who completed a desired action, such as making a purchase. Indicates the effectiveness of your email in driving tangible results.
If a lot of your emails aren’t getting delivered, it could mean there’s something wrong with your list of email addresses or with the way you’re sending emails. These metrics can help you figure out what parts of your email campaigns need to get better.
9. Complying with Anti-Spam Laws and Regulations
Knowing and sticking to anti-spam laws means you’re doing email marketing the right way, which helps you build trust with people and keep a good reputation as a sender.
Some anti-spam laws you may not be familiar with are as follows:
- Not Gaining Explicit Consent: Sending emails without obtaining clear permission from the recipient.
- Lacking an Unsubscribe Option: Failing to include an easy way for recipients to opt out of future emails.
- Missing Physical Address: The email does not provide a valid physical mailing address.
- Misleading Subject Lines: Using deceptive or unclear subject lines that don’t reflect the email’s content.
- Ignoring Unsubscribe Requests: Continue sending emails to recipients who have previously opted out.
If you don’t follow these rules, you could get in big trouble, hurting your brand. So, it’s important to know about these laws, which can be different in different countries, and ensure you’re doing things right in your email marketing.
10. Personalizing Emails for Enhanced Engagement
Personalizing your emails in marketing is a smart way to get people more interested and ensure they reach them. When you make emails that fit what each person likes and is interested in, your emails become more important and interesting to them. This makes people more likely to open and read your emails and less likely to be seen as spam.
You can personalize emails by using the person’s name, writing about things based on what they’ve done or liked before, and dividing your email list into different groups to send more specific emails. Some fancy ways to do this are using data to understand what different customers like and do so so you can make your emails even more personal.
When you personalize your emails, more people are likely to open them and click on things inside because they feel like the emails are just for them. This makes your email campaigns work better and helps you look like a better sender.
11. Encouraging Reader Interaction and Feedback
Getting people to interact with your emails is a smart way to ensure your emails are delivered well and that you have a good reputation as a sender. When people reply to your emails, it shows email services that your emails are interesting and valuable to the people who get them.
Some ways to get more people to interact with your emails are to write them in a way that makes people want to respond. You can ask for their thoughts, opinions, or what they like. Putting questions in your emails that make people want to answer back or doing surveys are good ways to get people involved. Also, making your emails more personal, like we discussed, can make people more likely to respond because they feel the email is really for them.
Another idea is to put fun stuff in your emails, like quizzes or contests that make people want to join. These things make people feel more connected to you and give you good information about what your audience likes and how they act. This helps you make your email marketing even better.
Sealing the Deal on Email Deliverability
This guide highlights essential strategies for maximizing email deliverability in email marketing. It includes several major tips to maximize the effectiveness of email marketing, so pay close attention to what you think needs work.
Adopting these practices can improve the likelihood of your emails reaching the intended inboxes and enhance recipient engagement and trust. Implementing these strategies will lead to better campaign, ultimately contributing to the overall success of your email marketing efforts.