Why email deliverability is crucial to a brand’s success, and how you can boost your own

by Anastasia Kalonji, Content Assistant at Innovation Department

Landing an email in a customer’s inbox isn’t as easy as we’d like it to be. It requires a deep understanding of how the internet operates, how an audience behaves, and a whole plethora intricacies about how ISPs and ESPs work. The dreaded “d” word — (we’re talking about deliverability)—can haunt marketers, and if mismanaged, sabotage their email efforts. In fact, bad deliverability can seriously hurt a brand’s reputation, reduce engagement, and plummet ROI — a marketer’s biggest nightmare. Considering deliverability is already extremely difficult to tackle alone, it’s even harder to decipher without training. But fret not, we’ll help you master it in no time. By understanding the importance of email marketing, learning the basics of deliverability, and utilizing its best practices, your emails will consistently and successfully grace your subscriber’s inbox.

The value of email marketing

Marketing is the art of showing how your product—whether it’s a physical item or a service—will satisfy a consumer’s needs and solve their problems such that they feel inclined to convert. By pinpointing a customer’s wants, marketers can create a perfectly tailored product, and then lean on marketing to build effective messaging around the product, achieve successful conversions, and glean insights to help improve the product overall.

Email marketing achieves the same, but in a digital format. More specifically, brands traditionally use email marketing to reach three main goals:

• Promote products and raise awareness of the brand
• Secure purchases and increase revenue (it’s all about the ROI, right?)
• Build relationships with new customers while sustaining ones with loyal buyers

To achieve these three underlying goals — promotion, sales, and customer relationship management — marketers send new product alerts to their subscribers, notify them of potential discounts, update them on the brand’s growth, and offer exclusive content via newsletters that helps keep the customers excited and engaged between purchases.

You might be rolling your eyes and thinking: are all of those promotional emails flooding my inbox really effective in locking down sales for brands? As a matter of fact, yes. Here’s why:

• Email marketing is the best online platform for customer acquisition — so much so that it’s more effective than social media. In fact, according to Lyfe Marketing, 94% of us still use email — not so outdated after all! Truly, email has been and still is the best platform for immediate and widespread reach.
• Email marketing is economic and cost-effective. In spite of it being one of the cheapest marketing tools around, it ranks the highest in ROI with a potential 4400% return rate, according to Campaign Monitor. This means that for every dollar spent on email, brands can expect a $44 return. Not a bad return, is it?
• Emails are personal and customizable. Thanks to evolving technology, you’re given complete creative liberty when it comes to email customization. You can therefore easily tailor a message to your audience for greater impact and engagement, and create visually engaging content that helps increase average CTR.
• Emails are action oriented. Emails convert super easily thanks to strategic CTA placements and action-oriented tag lines. Unlike paper flyers or billboards, email allows your audience to interact with your brand directly — they’re always just one click away!
• Email campaigns are measurable. Email efforts can be recorded, tracked, and therefore improved on efficiently. Contrary to email, traditional marketing tools (i.e. magazine, podcast etc.) have a difficult time measuring ROI.

Unfortunately email marketing isn’t as simple as sending out a few emails with branded content. It involves complex technicalities including picking out the right email service provider (ESP), A/B testing content, segmenting email lists for further message customization, etc. That said, email marketing still comes with its fair share of unknowns, and none is more difficult to get around than the black box that is deliverability. This leads us to our next point…

The importance of deliverability

Deliverability is your capacity, as a brand, to successfully land emails in your subscriber’s inbox. Deliverability is high when sends reach your customer’s primary inbox (yay!), but low when they touchdown in the dreaded junk folder (boo!).

While decoding deliverability can oft feel like a futile effort because of the number of factors that can come into play, there are a few essential email rules that can help you remain in the safe zone. But before diving into deliverability best practices, it’s important for you to understand why you should be monitoring this metric so closely and regularly:

• You’ll know if subscribers are actually receiving your emails. There’s nothing worse than building a beautiful campaign and realizing 30% of your list isn’t receiving it. By knowing your deliverability status, you can better track and measure overall engagement.
• You’ll determine the quality of your email list. Fluctuating deliverability could indicate your subscribers’ floundering loyalty. That being said, you can build a marketing strategy to win them back or clean your list for a fresh start. Knowing about deliverability will help you better understand your audience.
• You’ll understand what is and isn’t working. Are you sending good content or bad content? Changes in your deliverability rating can be a powerful indicator of overall campaign quality. This can then help you make improvements or necessary changes in order to build a successful marketing strategy accordingly.

Now that you recognize its great importance, how can you achieve high deliverability and maintain it?

The key to high deliverability

Deliverability (your capacity to land in a subscriber’s inbox) is a consequence of your actions as a sender. That’s wonderful news, right? This means you can control deliverability and improve it over time. To successfully do so, you’ll want to immediately implement the following practices.

Ensure your sender reputation is impeccable

When sending an email to your subscribers, email providers (i.e. Gmail, Yahoo!, etc.) run reputation checks. Your reputation “score” is tied to your Internet Protocol (IP) address. Your IP address is an online passport of sorts; it keeps a record of all your emailing activities, good and bad, including the quality of your content, contacts, and engagement levels. The more reliable your IP is, the higher your sender reputation score will be, and the more likely your emails will be to populate subscribers’ inboxes. On the flip side, the lower your IP score is, the more likely your sends will land in spam folders. To maintain a high sender reputation and therefore successfully reach your audience, follow these four rules of thumb:

• Send emails on a consistent schedule, based on your subscribers’ preferences.
• Maintain a clean email list to reduce bounce rates.
• Implement things like double opt-ins to avoid spam traps and keep your brand from being blacklisted.
• Minimize abuse complaint with high-quality and relevant content.

Use a high-quality email service provider (ESP)

Establishing and managing email infrastructures can be complicated, time-consuming, and expensive. To avoid dealing with the complexities of email on your own, work with an ESP (i.e Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, etc.) to handle your operations. An ESP will help you manage:

• Feedback loops. There are programs offered by Internet Service Providers’ email clients such as Yahoo! and Gmail that directly process spam complaints as opt-outs. This means that after a user clicks “Mark As Spam,” he or she should immediately be removed from your mailing list. ESPs will keep track of this process so that your sender reputation stays intact.
• IP addresses. Whether you decide on using a shared IP or dedicated IP, ESPs will help keep it clean to maintain high deliverability.
• Authentication. Setting up authentication tells email providers that your IP address has permission to send emails, and that your ESP sends them on your behalf. In other words, you’re certifying that you aren’t a spammer. Authentication is a two-step process, which involves verifying your IP address with the Sender Policy Framework (SPF), an email validation system built to prevent spam, and tying your IP address to your organization’s domain through the Domain Key Identified Mail (DKIM).

Once authentication is complete, your deliverability will increase and spam rates decrease — pretty neat right?

The comeback

If you’re just starting out with email marketing or you’ve been at it for some time but have been in the clear with deliverability, you can stop here knowing these tips on how to keep yourself going strong.

If, however, you’ve butchered your deliverability over the years with spammy sends and bad IPs, here are eight essential tips to help you reset your sending reputation and get back on track:

Only send email campaigns to the most engaged segments of your list — and hold off on sending to the idle.

There are two reasons as to why you should do this. By sending emails to your most active subscribers — the ones with the highest open rates — you can study their behavior more closely and better understand their needs. Secondly, because “spam opens” don’t register as “opens” in ESPs (i.e. MailChimp), only sending emails to engaged segments will boost deliverability and slowly restore your sending reputation.

Clean your email list.

One hundred super engaged contacts are more valuable than thousands of unengaged leads — remember, quality wins over quantity. Hold on to the people that are looking for your emails and get rid of the ones that aren’t. To make the filtering process a tad easier, ask yourself: How did I collect emails in the first place? Were they leads I bought two years ago? How old are these addresses and are they still in use? Are some of these emails fake? Take the weeds out, and you’ll uncover a blooming deliverability.

Pro Tip: Prevent fake and irrelevant addresses from entering your contact database by implementing a double opt-in process for signups. This system is a two-step process which allows you to collect new emails through a signup form, and revalidate those subscriptions through a confirmation form. Using it will protect your list from spammers or uninterested users.

• Do not write spammy subject lines, but feel free to use “free”. The subject line is the most important part of an email. It’s the piece of content that determines whether or not your subscriber will actually open the email and see your campaign. If it sounds suspicious, receivers won’t click, and ISP spam filters will automatically mark the email as spam. Therefore, writing catchy, appropriate, and relevant subject lines are extremely important. That doesn’t mean you can’t use “free”, “!!!”, “ALL CAPS” etc. In fact, email providers have stopped spamming subject lines containing the above language (unless abused) because hackers have caught on.
• Send emails consistently. Set up an email schedule and stick to it. The more structured and organized your emails are, the more they’ll grow in legitimacy and reliability. Your contacts will perceive consistency as quality, and your emails will stop being marked as spam. As a matter of fact, as subscribers start anticipating your emails, open rates will soar and deliverability will reset. Pro Tip: Send emails to your subscribers when they’re most active. Are they checking their inboxes on their way to work or in the evening before bedtime? A/B test to determine which times work best for your contacts.
• Make it easy to unsubscribe. This one may seem counterproductive as far as growth goes, but hear us out. As mentioned above, maximizing engagement with an active email list is a great way to maintain high deliverability. Therefore, allowing disinterested contacts to easily unsubscribe is crucial. That being said, make sure to include an obvious “unsubscribe” button at the top or bottom of each email.
• Look into dedicated IPs allowing you to take control of sender reputation. Many ESPs (i.e. MailChimp) assign the same IP address, called shared IP, to all of their clients or senders. Sharing an IP address allows these senders to pool resources and email reputations together. This means that the group’s high quality sends will boost everyone’s deliverability but that their bad email sends will also pull everyone’s down. Shared IPs are great for smaller businesses with low send rates and small email lists as they can benefit from the group’s established sender reputation. But if a business sends over 100, 000 emails a week, it’s best to consider using a dedicated IP that’s owned by you alone. By doing so, you’ll have total control over your sender reputation and, therefore, deliverability.
• Send campaigns from authenticated emails that use your business domain. Not doing so will send mixed signals to email providers. In fact, if a subscriber receives branded content from a personal email address (e.g., brandname@gmail.com) instead of your brand’s address (e.g., brand@yourwebsite.com), email providers will justifiably doubt the legitimacy of the campaign. The quid pro quo is a major red flag and email providers will blacklist your sends.
• Avoid spam traps at all cost. ISPs create fake emails to detect spammers. If your email reaches one of these fake inboxes, you’ll immediately get blacklisted by the email provider. That being said, you want to be careful not to buy emails or acquire too many of your emails through spammy tactics, like sweepstakes or incentivized referral programs. While these methods can give your list a boost from time to time, you want to make sure that you’re carefully weeding out low-quality or fake emails that tend to come in through those avenues. After all, it’s better to take the extra time to be safe today than to be sorry tomorrow!
• Link reputable domains in your emails. Every time you add a link to an email, you’re adding another domain name. That domain’s reputation can contribute to whether or not your subscriber is receiving an email in his or her inbox. If you’re promoting links with bad reputations, you’re hurting your deliverability. It’s therefore important for you to source you information responsibly and only include links with top-notch reputations in your emails.

In conclusion

Whether your brand has just recently started using email or has been utilizing it for years, understanding its value is crucial to building stronger relationships with subscribers. If you want to see your engagement soar and your email marketing strategy succeed, it’s crucial to tackle deliverability head on and follow best practices. These are the key components to building a bulletproof email marketing strategy!