What Actions Improve Email Deliverability?
Digital Marketing Interviews
What Actions Improve Email Deliverability?
In the quest to reach inboxes more effectively, we've gathered insights from marketing professionals on specific actions to improve email deliverability. Highlighting expertise from a Marketing Team Lead to a Founder and CEO, here are nine strategies, starting with crafting non-spammy subject lines and culminating with segmenting lists and monitoring metrics.
- Craft Non-Spammy Subject Lines
- Proofread for Professionalism
- Implement DKIM Signatures
- Require Email Verification
- Use Double Opt-In System
- Encourage Initial Email Replies
- Personalize 'From' Email Addresses
- Throttle Email Delivery
- Segment Lists and Monitor Metrics
Craft Non-Spammy Subject Lines
Your email subject line is a big deal—it's the first thing users see and can make or break whether they open your email. While ISPs are getting smarter with their filters and won't necessarily flag certain phrases as spam right away, it's still a good idea to steer clear of the usual spammy suspects.
Here are some examples to avoid: "Take action now!", "Risk-free", "A one-time offer", "Why pay more?".
There's no magic formula or specific words that will guarantee your email lands in the inbox, and plenty of legit emails use these words. But when you're coming up with your subject lines, try to highlight the real value of your message without sounding pushy or salesy. Pique curiosity with subject lines such as: "Read that you're X", "Seeing unpredictable price spikes in X?", "Caught your recent talk about X", "Looks like you're using X to do Y", etc.
After optimizing an email marketing campaign for our client in the financial industry, their open rates increased by 46%, helping them generate an average of 12-16 new leads per week.
Don't forget to keep it genuine and relevant!
Proofread for Professionalism
Based on my experience - always check your writing before you send the letter. I can say that 80% of recipients react negatively to emails containing grammatical and punctuation errors. With numerous high-quality translation services available, don't hesitate to use them before sending out your newsletter. Thorough proofreading can greatly affect how your audience views your professionalism and eye for detail. Taking these additional steps guarantees that your message is clear and impactful, ultimately enhancing your email deliverability rates.
Implement DKIM Signatures
We implemented custom DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) signatures for our email campaigns. This technical tweak allowed recipient email servers to verify that the messages were not tampered with during transit and that they indeed came from our domain. This action reinforced trust in our communications, significantly reducing the likelihood of our emails ending up in spam folders. The impact was clear: Our deliverability rates improved, and our emails achieved greater visibility, leading to increased engagement and conversions from our email marketing efforts.
Require Email Verification
One effective strategy I have used is to implement email verification for new subscribers. By requiring new subscribers to confirm their email address before receiving further communications, we can ensure our email list is accurate and engaged.
After subscribers join, we send an additional email offering them a 100% discount on a course or product they're interested in. This ensures engagement with our emails.
This not only helps to reduce bounce rates but also improves our sender reputation, leading to better overall email deliverability.
Use Double Opt-In System
We've implemented a double opt-in subscription system to improve our email deliverability rates. This system works by sending a confirmation message to new subscribers to verify their email addresses before officially adding them to our contact list. It's a key part of our strategy for keeping our email list clean and making sure we only add valid addresses.
From my experience, this process helps avoid fake addresses that can increase our email bounce rates and damage our sender's reputation. Since we started using this system, the reception of our emails has improved, and we've actually seen more engagement. Additionally, this method ensures we have more qualified contacts who are more likely to interact with our emails and less likely to mark us as spam.
Encourage Initial Email Replies
One trick I use to increase email deliverability is designing a creative way in the first email's content to drive recipients to reply to it. For instance, the first email might offer something of value, but it is only accessible if they reply 'Yes' to the email. By having the first email opened and replied to, I have seen large increases in open rates and deliverability for any welcome series in which I have implemented it. It helps prevent future emails from landing in the spam folder.
Personalize 'From' Email Addresses
We recently had some deliverability issues with our email campaigns from one of our company email addresses. In testing, we switched our 'from' and 'reply-to' email addresses to an individual person and saw substantial increases in deliverability and open rates with this change. It may be a great option for organizations to consider sending from an individual, rather than an 'info@' or 'marketing@' style address.
Throttle Email Delivery
We’ve adopted 'throttling' our email delivery to improve deliverability. Many Email Service Providers (ESPs) enforce a daily limit on the number of emails you can send to prevent spam from their platforms. Likewise, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) set limits on the number of emails they'll accept from the same IP address within a certain timeframe to curb spam.
If an email sender hits these rate limits, the emails become temporarily undeliverable—a scenario marketers refer to as a 'soft bounce.' Typically, the server will try to resend a soft-bounced email within 72 hours, but relying on this is risky. That's why we use throttling.
Throttling involves sending out emails in smaller batches over time, which helps avoid hitting these rate limits, prevents soft bounces, and reduces the risk of being marked as spam. For campaigns targeting large lists, especially those with over 250 recipients, we segment our lists. After segmentation, we carefully plan the timing of the campaign to ensure each segment receives the emails by the required date.
Segment Lists and Monitor Metrics
One specific action we have taken to improve email deliverability is to segment our email list based on customer behavior and interests. This allows us to send more targeted and personalized emails that are relevant to each subscriber, increasing the likelihood of engagement and preventing our emails from being marked as spam.
We also regularly monitor our email deliverability metrics, such as open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, and spam complaints. By closely monitoring these metrics, we can identify any issues with our email deliverability and take corrective actions, such as removing inactive subscribers or improving the quality of our email content.
