How To Make Sure Your Emails Land Into Your Recipient’s Inbox
A 4-minute read that could save your email reputation.
During the past month, I received 3 emails from a company I never heard of. I didn’t put too much attention on the first and second ones. But when I got the third one, I started to feel annoyed — even though the email looked good, it wasn’t salesy, and they actually wished me a great year for 2017.
I started to research whether I had subscribed to their newsletter or not — and quickly found that I hadn’t.
So why did they send me those emails?
I asked them the question. And they told me that I connected with someone from that company on LinkedIn, so they thought I was interested in what they had to offer, and added my LinkedIn email to their mailing list.
Let me tell you something: you absolutely don’t want to do that. Never.
When you know that Neil Patel says you can get $39.40 return on every $1 invested into email marketing, you understand how important that channel is.
And if you send emails to people who didn’t authorize you to do so, they get angry. And if they get angry, they mark your email as SPAM.
That’s the worst thing that could ever happen to your emails.
Why?
The answer is deliverability. HubSpot gives the following definition of email deliverability:
The measurement and understanding of how successful a sender is at getting their marketing message into people’s inboxes.
Obviously, you want your emails to reach your recipient’s inboxes. But that’s not something you earn forever. You’re not sure your email will actually land in those inboxes as soon as you hit “send”.
Your deliverability depends on your past performances.
You have an email reputation. And if people mark your emails as spam, needless to say that your reputation takes a hit. And the more people will mark you as spam, the worst your reputation will become, the worst your deliverability will be, and thus, the less your emails will land in your recipient’s inboxes (they will land in the spam instead).
It can become even worse
Depending on your Internet Service Provider (Comcast, AOL, Verizon…), you are “authorized” to get a certain amount of your emails marked as spam. But if that number of spams you get exceeds the critical number, your Internet Service Provider (ISP) can directly shut you down.
And this is how you lose one of the greatest marketing channels.
So what should you do to make sure your deliverability is doing well?
These are all pieces of advice from Hubspot in their Email Marketing Certification (I recommend it to anyone who wants to go further into email marketing):
- Make sure you got all these email addresses in a legit way. Getting the email address of someone is about building a relationship. They trust you to deliver something valuable to them. What’s legit: they left their email address on your blog to get more info (and became leads). Not legit: purchasing an email list.
- Ask for permission. Make sure that at some point, you ask for permission to send what you want to send. Example: you want to send them offers of your product? Tell them before they subscribe. People don’t like surprises in their inboxes.
- Don’t send emails to people who never open your emails. Your ISPs don’t like it and will rank you based on that. So regularly delete those ones who haven’t engaged with your content during the past year. Of course, you will have a smaller list, but it’s way better for you and your ISP.
- If you send regularly, your bounce rate should be low. 1% or lower! A high or rising bounce rate is clear evidence that the inbox providers do not like you or your content.
- Don’t use link shortener. They are used by spammers to hide where their links will actually end up.
There you go. If you follow these best practices, your deliverability should be fine!
Thanks for reading.
I wish you many successful email campaigns!
