How to Increase Deliverability with the Recommendations of EmailMarker

Every marketer has at some point heard about the rate of deliverability of emails going out into the cyberspace, about their email open rate and certainly about avoiding any traps that would decrease the emailer’s sender reputation. However, without knowing how to implement these suggestions they remain just empty phrases with no real value to you or your digital marketing campaign. So, let us first start by giving you a straightforward explanation of each before going into the how-to of their implementation into your next email marketing venture!

What does deliverability mean?

In the simplest of terms, deliverability rate refers to the percentage of your emails actually reaching the people that you want to open and read those emails. One would immediately ask why there is a rate. Shouldn’t all sent out emails reach the recipients’ email addresses? Well, the internet, unfortunately, does not work in such a direct, straightforward way and here is why.

More than 30% of legitimate emails do not reach the inboxes of your clients. It is a startling statistic, however the truth is such because there are so many technical constraints that a sender must follow and respect such as authenticating your email recipients, verifying the type of their email addresses, ensuring the validity of the email addresses on your customer email list and many more adding to the complexity of sending an email.

We at EmailMarker pride ourselves at our 97% email inbox placement, a rate significantly higher than any other on the email verification market. Our verification system places your email list through a five-stage verification process ensuring the “hygiene” and validity of each and every one of your customer email addresses and subsequently making sure your sender reputation is not only intact but significantly improved.

What is an open rate?

The name is self-explanatory to a certain extent and it refers to the percentage of your emails that are actually opened. Working on your deliverability is not enough anymore. We will discuss open rates and how to increase them a little later, so take this as a little intro to the topic.

What email traps should you look out for?

The cyberspace is an entity of its own with its separate rules and precautions. Very often internet service providers impose order and ensure the protection by setting traps to lure in potential spammers and protect the email users from abuse and their addresses from illegitimate and unapproved use. Such traps are called spam traps and they can appear on your email address lists without you even noticing because they very much look like real email addresses. The internet service providers’ goal is to see which senders are keeping track of their email lists and ensuring that they are dealing only with valid, legitimate and approved email addresses.  If you are not paying attention to which emails you are sending your content to you are very likely to hit a spam trap making your email bounce and immediately decreasing your sender reputation. And one penalty for keeping poor email address hygiene is reduced deliverability the next time you send an email because you have lost the trust of the internet service providers.

Other similar traps in which you might get caught up are disposable emails, invalid emails, incorrect email addresses, accept all email addresses and much more which look and sound as valid email addresses, but threaten you with a loss of sender reputation and decreased deliverability very soon after hitting any one of them.

What can you do to ensure the deliverability of your emails?

The best thing any marketer could do is to not let their contact email address lists get neglected and contaminated with invalid, disposable and incorrect email addresses in the first place. However, if this happens, as it has to even the best of us, your best marketer move would be to put that job in the hands of the expert teams here at EmailMarker and let us make sure that your list is “clean” and safe to send to.

And once you receive back the cleaned out and tidied up list there are a couple of things that we suggest you could do to immediately bounce back and improve your deliverability rate.

Read through them and try to implement as many as possible in order to get right back on track engaging your customers, receiving feedback and increasing your email open rates.

1. SEND OUT EMAILS WITH CLEAR CONTENT AND SUBJECT LINE

The first thing any email recipient sees is the subject line of the email they received. If the subject line is obscure or unreflective of the message you are trying to convey the probability of the recipient opening that email is very low. And once your subject line is clear make sure that the content of the message is straightforward and to the point. No one likes wasting their time trying to figure out what is it that you are promoting. The clearer the message the higher the open rate the better the response and feedback from the customers.

2. COMPARTMENTALIZE YOU EMAIL ADDRESS LIST

This is especially important if you are offering different services or personalized information according to the customers’ interests. Create separate lists of customer email addresses with similar interests or receiving similar services from your company in order to cater to the right audience. If you send out every email to every customer regardless of their preferences your customers will most probably ignore your emails at best or even report them if they are overwhelmed with unnecessary information, thus harming your sender reputation and thus deliverability rate.

3. KEEP TRACK OF YOUR CUSTOMERS

Client engagement is the key to creating a loyal customer network. However, if there is little to no response from the client you are trying to engage with your campaign for more than six months, the best thing to do is to remove them from your email address list altogether in order to reduce your risk of being reported and avoid increasing your complaint rates.

4. BE AWARE OF THE SOURCE OF AN EMAIL ADDRESS

One thing you should always pay attention to is how you gather your email addresses. If it is through free giveaways or contests or free promotional signups than the probability of your customers creating fake, disposable and one-time emails is pretty high which in turns means that your risk of sending a promotional email to some of those emails back is pretty high as well. Make sure that your sourcing of email addresses delivers real and valid customers genuinely interested in your service and product instead of customers interested in the promotional rewards.

5. SIMPLIFY YOUR UNSUBSCRIBE PROCESS

Very often marketers make it impossible for subscribers to unsubscribe which forces the customers to hit the spam button in order to stop you from sending them unwanted emails. This is very easily fixable and we highly recommend you do it because it will save you a lot of time and money by not having to save and improve your reputation later on after being labeled as a spammer by one too many customers.