When it comes to email marketing, you might have the best, most strategic campaign plan, the most expertly crafted email messages, and the perfect products and inventory to showcase to your audience. But it’s all for naught if your emails don’t actually get delivered.
The factors that affect email deliverability are more complex than you’d imagine. We’re here to help you “get the message” of the importance of email deliverability and master the subtle art of sending emails that your audience will receive.
What is Email Deliverability?
Email deliverability is the percentage of sent emails that see inboxes. As opposed to email delivery, which measures the number of emails that are successfully accepted by the recipient’s mail server (regardless of folder), email deliverability measures emails successfully sent to inboxes only.
When you view email marketing as a means of capturing the attention of current and potential customers, email deliverability makes all the difference. It’s an important measurement, especially when you consider that more than half of all people (52%) check their junk folders at most once per week, with 18% of those people checking less frequently and 5% never checking at all, according to DMA’s Consumer Email Tracker.
Also, emails that fail to find inboxes negatively impact the reputation of your business and marketing messages, merely by association with other unwanted spam content.
The Impact of Spam Emails
Spam mail is unsolicited email content that’s sent out en masse. It’s a term that’s become synonymous with doing something repeatedly to disturb others, and email providers go to great lengths to find and filter out spam messages.
Spam is the primary reason legitimate marketing emails go undelivered and the most obvious metric that mailbox providers use to identify emails that users don’t want. They do this by filtering unwanted messages through blocklists and spam filters.
- Blocklists prevent mail from being delivered to an address. They do this by identifying senders who use purchased lists, old lists, or have poor list hygiene. Blocklists are triggered by spam complaints from recipients or by delivery to a spam trap address.
- Spam filters deliver wanted mail to the inbox and the rest to a spam folder. These filters can be applied to content, domains, or IPs. They’re triggered by signals such as overall audience engagement, spam complaints, and spam trap deliveries.
When your emails are identified as spam, either by a mailbox provider or the recipients themselves, your future emails can be filtered into junk folders or blocked completely. Considering that a substantial number of people only check their junk folders a few times a year, that essentially means your emails aren’t being received or read.
The Value of Sender Reputation
Just as your business has a reputation among your customers, your emails have a reputation among mailbox providers and spam filters. Your reputation doesn’t just impact people’s perceptions of your business, it significantly impacts email deliverability. A good sender reputation can ensure email deliverability. A bad one will filter emails to spam folders.
The main contributor to sender reputation is subscriber engagement—a measurement of how your audience interacts with your emails. Other factors include spam traps, blocklists, feedback loops, and inbox placement data. However, positive sending behaviors and subscriber responses improve your chances of successful email deliverability.
There are three main types of sender reputation:
- IP Reputation: The score given to an internet protocol (IP) address based on past activities.
- Domain Reputation: The overall health of a branded email domain, as determined by mailbox providers and internet service providers (ISPs).
- Content Reputation: The content you post, as well as your behaviors in digital communities, impacts your reputation.
Restoring a damaged sender reputation can be difficult, so it’s always best to take a proactive approach in keeping up a positive sender reputation. You can do this by consistently monitoring your engagement metrics to pinpoint areas for improvement in your email sending practices, including:
- Spam rates
- Open rates
- Click-through rates
- Bounce rates
- Block rates
- Unsubscribe rates
Email Deliverability Best Practices
You don’t have to rely on chance or the complexities of mailbox protocols to ensure email deliverability. You can take email matters into your own hands with the following best practices:
Avoid Sending Emails Too Often
Email marketing is all about finding the right frequency and cadence for sending messages. It’s a balancing act between capturing your customers’ attention without annoying your audience. When the scales tip toward over-sending, your recipients may report your messages as junk.
Always monitor the number of emails you send, as well as the number of emails your customers receive. Avoid sending too many emails, especially over a short period of time, and reduce the frequency of emails for customers who rarely engage. This will ensure that a high rate of emails stay in your audience’s inboxes without being reported as junk.
Implement a Sunset Policy
Undelivered emails impact your metrics. When too many of your emails are identified as undelivered, they can trigger spam filters and send emails to junk folders, even for new recipients.
If a customer hasn’t engaged with your dealership in the past 90 – 120 days, avoid bombarding them with more communication and consider removing them from your email list or finding a better re-engagement method.
Segment Your Audience
When you send out emails that feel impersonal, recipients recognize them as mass marketing and they’re more likely to report emails as junk. Of course, that simple action can have a ripple effect that impacts the deliverability of all future emails. It’s the impact of pervasive spam emails.
To make your marketing messages more personal, divide your audience into groups based on set criteria such as behavior, history, interests, and geolocation. Then, tailor campaigns to each segment to add personalization and increase engagement among your audience.
Follow Legislation to the Letter of the Law
The United States government has implemented certain laws and regulations designed to protect consumer privacy and prevent unsolicited emails from being delivered to inboxes. This can seriously impact deliverability, especially if you fail to comply with every stated regulation.
To avoid potential legal concerns and email inbox delivery failures, it’s important to stay compliant with legislation governing commercial emails, including the CAN-SPAM Act. The CAN-SPAM Act establishes the requirements you must follow for sending commercial emails and gives your recipients the right to stop receiving emails.
The main dos and don’ts of the legislation include:
- DON’T use false or misleading header information
- DON’T use deceptive subject lines
- DO identify the message as an ad (if it’s an ad)
- DO tell recipients where you’re located
- DO tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future marketing emails
- DO honor opt-out requests promptly
- DO monitor what others are doing on your behalf
Send High-Quality Content
The best way to ensure email deliverability is to take matters into your own hands and send high-quality content. Consider the following best practices to ensure that your emails resonate with your audience:
- Use a compelling subject line with a clear sender name
- Include an address that is easily recognizable to the recipient
- Don’t use excessive capitalization and exclamation marks, or spammy keywords
- Have a good mix of text and image (about 60% text to 40% image)
- Use ALT text for all images to provide context and description for images
- Have one or two clear calls-to-action (CTAs)
- Keep total email size below 102KB
- Include a clear and easy-to-find unsubscribe link (recipients will be less likely to report your emails as spam)
- Include a valid physical address in the footer
- Choose a responsive design that adapts to different devices (desktop vs mobile)
Ensure Email Security
Mailbox providers can detect and verify emails that are sent from less-than-legitimate organizations. If an email fails to meet their high security standards, it gets filtered to spam folders. You can meet these high security standards by ensuring your emails meet the following security measures:
- DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) ensures that the email content you sent hasn’t been tampered with during transit by validating and authorizing your domain name.
- SPF (Sender Policy Framework) records to specify which servers are authorized to send emails on behalf of your domain. This helps prevent spoofing, the practice of sending emails disguised as a trusted source and improves deliverability.
- DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) policies instruct email receivers how to handle unauthenticated emails. It’s a way of verifying the authenticity of an email’s sender and preventing a malicious sender from damaging your reputation.
You work too hard on your email marketing campaigns to risk undeliverability issues. Pay attention to the factors that affect email deliverability, and find more success with your email metrics, engage with your audience, and bring in more buyers to your business.
To learn more about how you can make your email marketing campaigns more successful, contact your Performance Manager.