Even for the most experienced marketer’s Email deliverability is an all-the-time battle.
There’s most likely nothing more sensitive than understanding that the email you had cautiously composed and structured never reached the customer’s inbox, it was likely pushed into the Junk or Spam folder where it won’t be ever read.
If your email isn’t reaching where it tends to be read, everything else is useless. So, email deliverability is critical and has been a challenge for marketers.
What is Email Deliverability is & Why it’s Important?
When it comes to email marketing, this is a critical question, which troubles the mind of marketers.
Email deliverability is the ability to reach out to the subscribers’ inbox as planned – is the key metrics that marketers aim to get right.
Normally, when a customer doesn’t read an email, they’re either not interested in the content, or the email did not arrive in their inbox. As a marketer, it ends up hard to get to the explanation for the reason behind failing email deliverability because service providers use filters to determine the destiny of an email. In any case, these filters may block even genuine emails. So how can you keep your brand reputation to prevent being lumped into an unlawful heap? – Stick to best practices to guarantee a high deliverability rate and clean the marketing list using an email list verification tool to remove unwanted email addresses. Moreover, you have to keep an eye on its remaining with recipients and ISPs.
5 Factors Affecting Email Deliverability
Below is the list of 5 factors that impact email deliverability
- IP address reputation
- Sender Reputation
- Email subject line and contents
- Email Service Provider – your automation partner
- Email list quality
1. IP address reputation
An IP address is a unique numerical name to each device that is associated with any PC organization utilizing the Internet Protocol (IP) to communicate over a network. IP address reputation is the degree to which the IP address (really the sender utilizing the IP address) has played responsibly while sending messages.
Spam channels decide incoming emails based on the different attributes, the IP address reputation of the sender is one among them.
While sending bulk emails, you can either use a shared IP or a dedicated IP. A shared IP is where multiple senders utilize a similar IP address as you do, to send their emails from.
The reputation of a shared IP address is the total reputation of each one of those who have utilized the IP before you do. So sharing an IP additionally indicates sharing the reputation of every other person utilizing the same IP. Poor practices of any of the previous sender will adversely impact your email deliverability.
On the other hand, a dedicated IP is one where you are the only user of the IP address. Henceforth the reputation of a dedicated IP is affected just by your practices, you are the main client of that IP. That gives you supreme authority over the IP reputation.
2. Sender Reputation
Sender reputation is a composite after-effect of the IP address you send emails from, your domain reputation, SPF (Sender Policy Framework) validation, the bounce rate of your emails till date, customer complaints, engagement, regardless of whether (and what number of) spam traps sit on your customer list and other many variables.
Email engagement is what your customers do when they get your email is critical. Customer actions that suggest they are happy to cooperate further with you, such as opening the email, reading the email, tapping on a link, following a call to action, forwarding the email, etc. are considered ‘ good engagement’. Activities like not opening the email or deleting the email without knowing it is considered ‘poor engagement ‘.
3. Email subject line and contents
Almost 60% of the email traffic worldwide is spam. That proposes spammers are getting forceful, so spam filters need to stay a step ahead.
Check your emails from the line, subject line, and email duplicate, and avoid using language and practices that may look like spam to a content-based spam filter. One-way spam filters recognize spam is the email content so, avoid the following:
- Spam-like words: Free, guarantee, credit card, sex, etc.
- All capital letters: Resist the temptation to utilize capital letters and over-punctuate. When you use the capital letter, there is no separation in your words. This makes the emails harder to read. It makes your email look like spam and significantly increases the probability of your email being filtered.
- Incomplete data: Your physical location is required by law. In case you’re a Constant Contact, you can refresh this data in the footer of your email.
Unnecessary punctuation!!!: Subject-lines with too many exclamations marks going to trip email filters, particularly when utilized related to spam-like words and capital letters.
- Extreme utilization of $$, and other symbols: Again, this strategy is probably going to trip email filters. Use only one dollar sign for cash and utilize descriptive words rather than symbols to convey the message.
- Misleading (or missing) subject line: Always match your subject title to your email content and never employ spam strategies like leaving the subject clear or utilizing Re: with the goal that the beneficiary supposes it is an answer to a previous email.
Other content that looks shady to spam channels incorporates weight decrease, body improvement, and related drug store items.
Earlier, emails with shortened URLs in the content were normally red-flagged; today occasions of a shortened URL being red-flagged are much less successive, because of its substantial use in social media platforms like Twitter. Emails that include just a link or just an image are generally treated as spam.
4. Email Service Provider (ESP) – Your Automation Partner
Select your ESP based on their knowledge and technical competence and not some tall cases. For instance, guarantees by ESPs about overnight enhancement in your deliverability rates when you change to their service from somewhere else are mostly too good to be true. All things considered, something inverse is similarly liable to occur!
Keep in mind, when you switch ESPs, you are likewise exchanging IP addresses. So when the recipient mailbox providers see you’re all of a sudden sending from another range of IPs, they will, legitimately, turn carefully and may put fewer emails in the inbox than they did with the more established IP address.
If your new ESP doesn’t comprehend the importance of throttling, the recipient email box provider may push a greater amount of your emails into the Spam folder.
5. Email List Quality
One of the elements affecting the deliverability rates of your messages is likewise the one you can quickly follow up on bad email addresses.
Maybe there was an error when the customer entered the email address while signing up, probably the customer intentionally entered a wrong address, perhaps the customer is utilizing a disposable address, reasons like this lead to your rundown containing various email addresses that are not safe to send emails to.
Sending emails to these addresses leads to bounces, poor or no engagement (if the address is role-based or disposable), or complaints. For instance, if you are sending emails to role-based addresses results in high complaints. In this way, poor list hygiene impacts email deliverability. To maintain email list quality I would suggest using a good bulk email verification service.
Bottom Line
In short, elements such as sending without custom authentication, using single opt-in, sending from a free domain email address, using spam flossing email subject lines, making it challenging to unsubscribe, using shorter URLs, and sending emails with too many images badly affect your email deliverability.
So, how to improve your email deliverability? Check out our Blog on 15 various ways to improve your email deliverability to take the steps to maximize your email deliverability.