10 Email Deliverability Best Practices

Introduction to Email Deliverability

Email is an essential communication tool for businesses, but sending emails is not enough. They must reach their intended recipients’ inboxes. Email deliverability is the ability of an email to reach its intended recipient’s inbox, and it is critical to the success of email marketing campaigns. According to research, almost 20% of marketing emails do not reach their target audience’s inbox, and this can be attributed to a variety of factors, including spam filters, poor sender reputation, and subscriber engagement.

In this blog post, we will cover email deliverability tips that will help you reach your audience’s inbox and avoid common pitfalls that prevent your emails from being delivered. We will explore how sender reputation, email content, subscriber engagement, and technical factors impact email deliverability and provide recommendations for improving each area. By the end of this article, you will have a better understanding of email deliverability and the actions you can take to ensure your emails are delivered to your subscribers’ inboxes.

Email Deliverability for Businesses

Email deliverability is a critical factor for the success of businesses that rely on email marketing campaigns to reach their target audience. Deliverability issues can result in lower open rates, click-through rates, and conversions, leading to lost revenue and wasted marketing spending. In contrast, good email deliverability results in higher engagement and conversion rates, leading to a better return on investment (ROI) for email marketing campaigns.

Furthermore, poor email deliverability can damage a business’s reputation and harm its ability to communicate with its customers. It can also result in missed opportunities to connect with prospects, leading to lost sales or potential customers. A high bounce rate, high spam complaint rate, or low engagement rate can damage a business’s sender reputation, causing email service providers (ESPs) to block future emails, making it even harder to reach the target audience.

Ultimately, the ability to deliver emails to the target audience’s inbox is critical to the success of any email marketing campaign. By focusing on email deliverability best practices, businesses can increase the likelihood that their emails will reach their intended recipients and achieve their desired outcomes.

Sender Reputation for Email Deliverability

Sender reputation refers to the overall reputation of the sender’s domain and IP address. This reputation is based on factors such as how frequently the sender’s emails are marked as spam or how many bouncebacks are generated when sending emails. Essentially, the sender’s reputation is a measure of how trustworthy and reliable they are when it comes to sending emails. ISPs and email service providers (ESPs) use sender reputation to determine whether to deliver the sender’s emails to their subscribers’ inboxes or to the spam folder.

Does sender reputation affect email deliverability?

Yes, If a sender has a good reputation, ISPs and ESPs are more likely to deliver their emails to the inbox. Conversely, if a sender’s reputation is poor, their emails may be blocked or filtered into the spam folder. This is because ISPs and ESPs want to protect their users from receiving unwanted emails, and sending emails from a domain with a bad reputation indicates that the sender may be sending unwanted or unsolicited emails.

To maintain a good sender reputation, here are some best practices that businesses should follow:

Send relevant and engaging content: Sending relevant and engaging content will increase subscriber engagement and decrease the likelihood that subscribers will mark your emails as spam.
Authenticate your email: Using authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC will help to verify that your emails are legitimate and not sent from a fraudulent source.
Manage bounces: Keep track of the bounces generated by your emails and remove invalid email addresses from your list. This will help to keep your email list clean and reduce the likelihood of generating high bounce rates.
Avoid spam traps: Email addresses that are no longer in use can be converted into spam traps, so be sure to remove inactive subscribers from your email list.
Monitor your sender’s reputation: Keep an eye on your sender’s reputation using monitoring tools to identify issues and address them before they become major problems.

Email Content

Email content is one of the most critical factors that can impact email deliverability. ISPs and ESPs analyze the content of each email to determine if it should be delivered to the inbox or spam folder. Factors such as the subject line, the sender’s name, and the body of the email all play a role in whether an email will be considered spam or not.

Why email content is important for email deliverability?

ISPs and ESPs use advanced algorithms and machine learning to analyze emails for spam content. If an email is identified as spam, it will be filtered out, and it will not reach the intended recipient’s inbox. Therefore, it’s crucial to ensure that the email content meets the ISPs’ and ESPs’ requirements for a non-spam email.

Follow the best practices while writing email content

To create email content that is more likely to reach the inbox, everyone should follow the best practices as mentioned below –

Personalize your email: Personalizing your email by using the recipient’s name or other personal information can increase the chances of the email being opened.
Keep it relevant and engaging: Ensure that the email content is relevant to the subscriber and engaging enough to encourage them to take action.
Use a recognizable sender name and email address: Use a recognizable sender name and email address to help build trust with the subscriber.
Optimize your email for mobile devices: With more than 50% of emails being opened on mobile devices, it’s essential to optimize email for mobile devices.
Avoiding spam triggers:
To avoid triggering spam filters, businesses should avoid using certain words or phrases that are commonly associated with spam. These include words like “free,” “limited-time offer,” and “act now.” Additionally, avoid using excessive capitalization or excessive punctuation in their email content. They should also avoid using too many images or large image files, which can increase the email’s spam score.

Learn what are spam traps in detail

Subscriber Engagement

Subscriber engagement refers to how subscribers interact with the emails they receive from a business. Engagement can be measured by factors such as email opens, clicks, and conversions. Subscriber engagement is critical to email deliverability because ISPs and ESPs use engagement metrics to determine whether emails should be delivered to the inbox or spam folder. If subscribers are not engaging with emails, ISPs and ESPs will see the emails as irrelevant or uninteresting, and they will be filtered out as spam.

Best practices for increasing engagement

To increase subscriber engagement, businesses should follow these best practices:

Segment your email list: Segmenting your email list can help to ensure that subscribers receive content that is relevant to them.
Use personalization: Personalize your emails and Optimize your emails for all sizes of devices.
Use a clear call-to-action: Use a clear call-to-action that encourages subscribers to take action, such as making a purchase or visiting a website.
Handling inactive subscribers:
Inactive subscribers are subscribers who have not engaged with emails for an extended period, typically 6-12 months. To handle inactive subscribers, businesses should consider re-engagement campaigns, which involve sending targeted emails to inactive subscribers to encourage them to engage with the business again. If re-engagement campaigns do not work, businesses should consider removing inactive subscribers from their email list to maintain a healthy list and improve engagement metrics.

Technical Factors

Technical factors are critical to email deliverability. ISPs and ESPs use technical factors to determine whether an email should be delivered to the inbox or spam folder. Technical factors include authentication protocols, email design and formatting, HTML vs. plain text emails, sending frequency and volume, and handling bounces and complaints.

The role of technical factors in email deliverability:

Authentication protocols, email design and formatting, and sending frequency and volume are essential technical factors that impact email deliverability. Authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC help to verify the sender’s identity, which increases the chances of the email being delivered to the inbox.

Email design and formatting impact how the email is displayed to the recipient and whether it is easy to read and engaging. HTML vs. plain text emails impact email deliverability because HTML emails might trigger spam filters if not designed and coded correctly. Sending frequency and volume impact email deliverability because if a business sends too many emails too frequently, it can negatively impact engagement and cause the emails to be filtered out as spam.

Best practices for optimizing technical factors

To optimize technical factors for better email deliverability, a Few are mentioned below-

Use authentication protocols: Use authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to verify the sender’s identity and increase the chances of the email being delivered to the inbox.
Optimize email design and formatting: Optimize email design and formatting to ensure that the email is easy to read and engaging.
Manage to send frequency and volume: Manage to send frequency and volume to avoid overwhelming subscribers with too many emails.
Handle bounces and complaints: Handle bounces and complaints by removing bounced email addresses and unsubscribing complainers to maintain a healthy email list.

10 Email Deliverability Best Practices

Preparing a newsletter and sending it to our leads which have been collected for many years gives excitement but you know that sending emails is one thing and reaching the subscriber’s inbox is another. Sending emails is not a big deal but to make reach out to the subscriber’s inbox is the main target. In the email marketing industry, we have to follow some policies keenly. As well as following rules, we have to make sure to apply all the approaches that enhance our email deliverability. So here below I am going to describe the things which must be kept in mind before sending emails.

1. Don’t buy an email list

Sending emails to the purchased list is the worst idea. Never purchase an email list this trick will not be beneficial for your business. It’s all about spamming. If you are running a genuine business then totally avoid this.

Creating your own subscribers will help you a lot as well you will get a targeted audience.

2. Use the opt-in approach

The opt-in process is the most recommended in email marketing. An opt-in process can catch your subscriber’s focus so if they mistakenly misspelt then they can correct it. Using an opt-in process reduces the hard bounce.

In case your verification email drops in the spam or junk folder then a user reaches there and marks it as not spam and verified. This improves your deliverability from the next time whenever you send an email this reaches in inbox only. Read Hard bounces and Soft bounces.

3. Use proper information and avoid spamming words as much as you can

Don’t forget what you promise your subscriber when asking for the email address. Always send emails for what they subscribed to otherwise the following things will happen whether they lose interest in your emails or might be reported as spam and both things affect your deliverability.

4. Active time of users

Analyse your campaign report like email open rate, click rate, etc and make a report ready with the stats like the day and time you receive the best results. Based on the stats you have to schedule the email campaign, so that user engagement increases exponentially.

As per the report of “hive.co”
Active Users by timing: Highest open rate timings are 11 am, 2pm & 6 pm (highest open rate)
Active users by Days: Most emails open on Friday & Most clicks on Tuesday.

Note – The above stats varies as the above-mentioned websites update their data.

5. Send an engaging email

AB testing never is stopped. What they are expecting you can only know by AB testing. send an email to a user in which they respond, they will get interested so that you understand how many subscribers are responding to you, and how many still want to be on your list.

Learn AB testing in email marketing

For those who haven’t opened an email in a specific decided time frame let’s say 6 months send them a re-verification or re-subscribe email so that you get cleared who are still interested in your emails. I will show you the best example:
Below is an example of HubSpot which uses a creative and proper approach to get real and targeted leads.

7. Unsubscribe option should be visible easily

Never ever think to hide the unsubscribe option, showing the unsubscribe button clearly helps you to increase deliverability. Always remember to unsubscribe is much better than marking it as ‘spam’.
Place the ‘unsubscribe’ option at the top or at the bottom so it should be easy for subscribers to find it out top or bottom both are okay. Below is the example of Paytm here you can see how clearly Paytm is providing the unsubscribe option at the top just beside the sender’s info.

email deliverability best practices - unsubscribe option — Unsubscribe option(Ref- Paytm) – Email deliverability best practices

8. Clean your email list

Remove hard bounces permanently from your list because there is no sense in sending those emails, again and again, it always results in failure and it reflects on the sender’s reputation.

Learn Hard Bounce and Soft Bounces here

9. Track your email stats

It is a very good practice to track your email stats, not only you will understand the status of your email’s deliverability percentage, open rate, bounces etc but also you will get a clear idea about when and on what content you are getting higher engagement. What kind of content are people loving? what time they are engaging more? So stats are much important don’t neglect them. More open rates will help you in increasing marketing as well as in increasing your domain reputation.

10. Authenticate your emails

Authentication is the most important part of email marketing. Authentication knows your subscribers that are legitimate senders. Adding DNS records to your domain authenticate your emails.

Conclusion

In conclusion, email deliverability is not just about hitting the send button. It involves maintaining a good sender reputation, creating engaging content, and optimizing technical factors to ensure that emails are delivered to the inbox.

Email Deliverability Best Practices