With email spam filters becoming more severe all the time, improving your email campaign deliverability can make a huge difference to the success of your digital marketing.
It’s worth taking a minute to review the mistakes most likely to earn your emails a one-way ticket straight to the Junk Mail folder – or, worse, things that can stop your emails from being delivered altogether.
What is email deliverability?
Email deliverability, also known as the inbox placement rate, measures the number of emails that are successfully reaching your subscribers’ inboxes.
This is different to the email delivery rate, which simply measures if your subscribers can receive your emails. A good email delivery rate only means that an email is reaching your subscribers – it doesn’t tell you if these emails are being delivered to a recipient’s inbox or spam folder. Email deliverability, on the other hand, is a very useful metric.
Why is email deliverability important?
Email deliverability is incredibly important because it tells you whether your email marketing is likely to be successful.
Emails that are winging their way straight into a subscriber’s spam folder are far less likely to be seen and engaged with. And a lack of email engagement is a double-edged sword, because if your subscribers aren’t interacting with your email marketing, it can negatively affect your campaign data. This then increases the chances of your future emails being marked as spam.
This is why it’s so important to get out ahead of this problem, and work on improving your email deliverability rate.
How to improve your email deliverability
There are several ways to improve your email deliverability rate, and ensure your subscribers are engaging with your emails.
1. Avoid spam words
Just a single spammy word can earn your email a place in the spam folder – and this word can be in the email copy, the subject line, or the preheader text. Words such as free, cash, guarantee, win, opportunity, earn, offer, limited, and even the phrase click here – all of these should be avoided.
Never use impossible exaggerations, like 100% free, or 0% risk. You should also avoid phrases that create an unnecessary sense of urgency, like apply NOW, or act IMMEDIATELY, or limited time deal.
2. Avoid spam formatting
There are several formatting mistakes to be wary of when drafting your emails:
- Avoid using CAPITALISED WORDS in subject lines.
- Avoid using multiple exclamation marks!!! It doesn’t create a sense of excitement, it’s just really annoying!!!
- Don’t use overly large font sizes, and avoid bright red or green font colours.
- Don’t send an email with no content other than an image.
- Don’t compose and send emails using Microsoft Word.
- Avoid using email addresses such as sales@ or marketing@ when sending your emails. Use a real person’s name instead.
- Don’t send your emails using a Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook.com, or Yahoo email address.
3. Monitor your sender reputation
Having a good sender reputation, also known as sender score, is essential to improving your email campaign deliverability. A low sender reputation can lead to your IP being blacklisted – which will not do your email deliverability any good.
You can check your score using an online checking tool, such as senderscore.org.
4. Make sure your subscribers are actually interested in you
You are far less likely to get marked as spam if all your email subscribers are genuinely interested in your business. You can ask users to verify their email address when they subscribe to you. This checks that they have a valid email address and confirms they are interested in receiving your emails – which is better for your email engagement and deliverability rating.
It’s also a good idea to make it easy for subscribers no longer interested in being on your email list to unsubscribe. Having a confusing, unnecessarily long unsubscribing process won’t win you extra sales from people who can’t be bothered with the effort of unsubscribing – it will just make your emails more likely to end up in the spam folder.
5. Segment your subscribers list
Once you have ensured your subscribers are genuinely interested in your business, you can further improve your email deliverability by ensuring your subscribers receive content that is relevant to them. Segmenting your email subscriber list into different categories helps with this.
This segmentation will be based on:
- Demographics: A subscriber’s gender, age, occupation, etc.
- Location: Where a subscriber is in the world.
- Buyer’s journey stage: Are they aware of what your business offers, or considering a purchase?
- Customer data: Are they a new or existing customer? Have they engaged much with your emails in the past? If they’re an existing customer, are they a loyal customer who purchase from your business frequently?
Segmentation means your emails are more targeted and likely to appeal to your subscribers – as opposed to a generic, impersonal email that most people will delete after a cursory glance.
6. Scheduling is key
Establishing a consistent schedule for sending your emails is crucial to ensuring people engage with your content. But when you send these emails is also very important.
The right time and day to send an email will vary from industry to industry, and differ depending on what the purpose of the email is. An email sent at 10am on a Tuesday might perform much better than one sent at 4pm on a Thursday, depending on how you want your subscribers to engage with the email – and vice-versa.
A good email marketing strategy will create a carefully crafted schedule to help maximise the impact of your emails.
7. Authenticate your email domain
Email authentication tells your subscribers that any email from you is coming from a trusted, legitimate domain – not a fake, spam account.
There are a few different ways to authenticate your email domain:
- DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mails)
- SPF (Sender Policy Framework)
- DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance)
