You have your email lists, but your email deliverability rate seems to be as stagnant as ever. But don’t worry; there is a number of tactics you can use to improve your email deliverability rate.
Here are sixteen such techniques you can start using.
1. Build Your Email Lists
The first unspoken rule of any effective email marketing campaign is building your email lists yourself instead of buying them. If you buy an email list, it is unlikely that you will be able to maximize your deliverability rates.
Moreover, you may even get in trouble with regulators and authorities. If you already bought an email list, consider setting it aside and focusing on building your email list by using different tactics such as segmenting your leads. You can use one of the top Mailchimp Alternatives to get going with your lists.
2. Segment Your Leads
The best part about segmenting your leads is that you can target your audience more effectively. It may be hard to personalize messages at the beginning when you don’t know much about your leads, but once they are hooked, it will be a lot easier.
Try to divide your subscribers into two or three categories at the very start. You can use these to get started:
- Informational: These are subscribers that specifically signed up for the newsletter in hopes to get promotions, discounts, and useful content.
- Transactional: These are subscribers who made a purchase, abandoned the cart, or registered on your site or store.
- Competitive: These are subscribers you got from hosting a giveaway or contest. They will probably be not as engaged, but you can still try working with them.
Once you segment your email list, you will see an improvement in all of your metrics. In fact, the click-through rate of segmented campaigns is over 100% higher than that of non-segmented ones. After segmenting your leads, move on to another important issue: hard bounces.
3. Be on Top of Hard Bounces
Hard bounces are the emails you send to email addresses that either don’t exist or are no longer active. If you collect too many hard bouncers, your metrics will start decreasing because your emails will simply not be delivered.
In order to get rid of hard bouncers, consider one of these solutions:
- Double Opt-Ins: These will be discussed later on in the article. It’s a confirmation email you send for your subscriber to confirm their subscription. This will eliminate non-existent email addresses early on.
- Manual Cleaning: You can use different tools to clean your email lists from hard bouncers. Remember that even if a person confirmed their subscription, their email address can become inactive at any moment.
4. Cut off No-Openers
When cleaning your email lists from hard bouncers, look for no-openers too and get rid of them. No-openers are subscribers who don’t open your emails for long periods of time. For example, the person subscribed, confirmed their email, and then never once opened your messages for months.
To prevent such situations from happening, set certain limits for no-openers. If a person doesn’t open your emails, for example, for three months, cancel their subscription automatically and stop wasting your time on them. Then, stop for a moment and check your spam score just in case.
5. Check the Spam Score
Before you decide to send your next email, it would be a good idea to check the spam score of your email address. This score will tell you the likelihood of your emails getting filtered as spam based on your email address. You can check the spam score by using a tool such as Is Not Spam.
If your emails often get flagged as spam, your email address’s spam score will not be very pleasant. In addition to that, spam score tools highlight keywords in your emails that can get your message flagged as spam.
6. Send Confirmation Emails
As mentioned above, double opt-ins or confirmation emails are perfect for eliminating non-existent emails early on. The subscriber will not be added to your email list until they confirm their subscription.
Another advantage of double opt-ins is that they make your email lists get only the quality leads. If a person really does want to get emails from you, they will confirm their subscription and will be more likely to engage with your emails in the future. This way, you can even eliminate potential no-openers.
Besides, confirmation emails are a great way to increase your overall engagement levels. Surprisingly, order confirmation emails show open rates of as high as 70% with 64% of customers considering them most valuable. But they can be even more effective if you use a reputable email marketing platform.
7. Use a Reputable Email Marketing Platform
One of the reasons why your email deliverability rates may be suffering is that you are using an email marketing platform with a bad reputation. This automatically sends your emails to spam and does you no good whatsoever.
To solve this problem, try to use a reputable email marketing platform such as HubSpot or SendinBlue. The more popular it is, the more chances you have of getting your emails through to your subscriber. But there is another tip for keeping your subscribers engaged: creating a send schedule.
8. Create a Send Schedule
Having a send schedule will help you organize your email marketing and streamline it. Besides, you will also improve your deliverability rate as there will be more subscribers willing to open your emails if they arrive in their Inbox at the right time.
Consider making the frequency of your emails around once a week. This will ensure that you are not sending them so often that they become annoying and not so rarely that they are forgotten. Choose the day and hours during the day when people are more likely to check their email. But make sure that you don’t use any “forbidden” things such as attachments.
9. Never Add Attachments
Attachments are a huge red flag for filters. More often than not, your emails with even one attachment will be sent to spam. This is why you must forget about adding attachments entirely.
However, if you do need to send a PDF or a video or any other file, add a link to it instead. Your subscriber will click on it and download whatever you wanted to send. Links won’t get you into spam (unless they are suspicious, of course) and content in a different language won’t send any signals to the spam filters either.
10. Translate Your Emails
Translating your emails will be a big turn on for all of your international subscribers. The thing is that everyone whose first language isn’t English prefers their native language when it comes to viewing any kind of content.
This is why using an online translation service such as The Word Point to translate your emails can help you get through to the more timid subscribers who didn’t understand your emails in English. What must get through every time no matter the language is your subject line.
11. Test Your Subject Lines
Subject lines are the hook that make your subscribers click on the email and open it. If your subject lines are on-point, you can be confident that your open rates will flourish. Keep them between 11 to 15 words as these show the highest open rates (15%).
Before sending out your emails, make sure to test your subject lines with the help of tools or co-workers. Online tools may be accurate, but your colleagues are real people who can probably judge better in this situation.
12. Use Your Brand Name
In order to make your emails as personalized as possible, start using your brand name. You can use it both in the “from” line and in the subject line. When your subscriber sees that the email is from their favorite online store, they will be more likely to open the email.
It’s also a good idea to have your emails come from a representative. For example, putting “Katherine from XYZ Company” will be more effective than using “Katherine Drew” or “XYZ Company”. In addition to that, some people may want to receive emails from one person or another, so you would want to allow them to manage their preferences.
13. Allow Preference Management
One of the main reasons why people mark emails as spam is because they can’t find the option to unsubscribe. And the reason why they want to unsubscribe is that the emails started irritating them because of their frequency.
Allow your subscribers to manage their preferences and choose what kind of emails they want to receive. Add a button in every email with this option so that it can be easily found.
14. Send to the Most Engaged
One of the key factors that influences your reputation is how much your subscribers engage with your emails. This includes everything from opening the email to clicking through and watching a video on your site.
By sending more personalized emails to your most engaged subscribers you will be able to improve your engagement levels, reputation, and deliverability rates. Nevertheless, none of it will work if you get into a blacklist…
15. Check Blacklists
Checking the blacklists from time to time will ensure that your email address doesn’t appear on them. Blacklists are made to protect users from email addresses that have received a high volume of spam reports. If you get on such a list, it means you are in trouble.
You can check blacklists with tools such as MXToolbox. Make this a regular practice so that you are always confident that your email address is not on such list. You can also decrease the likelihood of your address getting to a blacklist with the help of the last tip.
16. Make Emails Authentic
If you are sending out emails from your own server, you will need to verify your email authentication settings. First, you should understand some terms that will be useful for you in the future:
- Sender Policy Framework (SPF): SPF detects whether an email coming from a domain was sent by an authorized IP on that domain.
- DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM): DKM is somewhat of a digital signature for an email that allows the sender to link their domain with the emails they send.
- Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, & Conformance (DMARC): DMARC helps senders stop their email addresses from being used in email spoofing scams and phishing.
Final Thoughts
All in all, improving your deliverability rate is possible if you follow these simple techniques. From building your own email lists to authenticating your email, all of these have proven to be effective techniques for improving your email deliverability rate.
