It can be really frustrating to send out a well-crafted and thought out email campaign where only 50% of your recipients receive it. In order to perform the best email marketing, it is critical to understand email deliverability. It can make the difference between having your emails land in your recipient’s inboxes, having them get marked as spam or even worse having them disappear altogether.
Your email marketing program needs to follow email deliverability best practices to keep your sending reputation intact and your recipients happy. In this blog post, we will cover different ways you can optimize your email campaigns and perform the best email marketing, so they stay on track and land in your audience’s inboxes.
Send an Onboarding Email
When a user subscribes to your email list, it is best that you send an onboarding email to welcome them to your list. Onboarding emails are an opportunity to connect with your new subscribers and acquaint them with the type of content they will receive from you in the future. It gives recipients piece of mind that they have signed up for the right email list and ensures that your relationship starts on a positive foot.
Send Relevant Email Content
One of the most important parts of email deliverability is ensuring that the content you send resonates with your audience. If the emails you send are not relevant, interesting and aesthetically pleasing, this can cause your email recipients to unsubscribe from your email list, or even worse, mark your emails as spam. As you send out content, regularly check your email metrics. This can help you determine which type of content is working, and which is not. Ensure to update your email strategy over time as your list grows, and always remember to write with your audience top of mind.
Regularly Cleanse Your Email List
We mentioned this in our previous blog post, but it is worth mentioning again. Having a clean, regularly cleansed email list is extremely important to perform the best email marketing. List hygiene is extremely important because helps you avoid sending your campaigns to out-of-date, hard bounced and unengaged emails, which can sometimes be spam traps. Sending emails to spam traps can cause deliverability rates to go down and ruin your sending reputation.
For details on how to optimally perform data hygiene procedures on your email list, please visit our previous blog post for more details.
Segment Your Email List
Along with regularly cleansing your email list, it is important to segment your email list. This practice can help you understand your audience, and group them in meaningful ways that allows you to create customized campaigns for these audience groups. This will improve your email deliverability because it will allow you to send emails that are relevant and meaningful to these groups, rather than sending out campaigns without a specific target. Segmentation allows you to get more specific with your email audience and build a better reputation as a result.
Create an Email Preference Center
One of the most common problem email marketers run into is sending too many email campaigns. This can annoy your audience and cause them to mark your emails as spam. Plus, if you send too many campaigns in a row this can cause your ISP to question your spammy behavior. In both cases, your email deliverability will go down as less of your campaigns land in your recipient’s inboxes.
To avoid this problem, it is ideal to have a preference center for your audience. This will allow them to customize the frequency in which they receive emails from your company and which types of campaigns they receive as well. Doing this will help you ensure that your audience engages with the campaigns that most resonate with them and deliver them a customized email experience. It can also reduce your unsubscribe rate by as much as 20% over time.
Follow Global Spam Laws
It is imperative that you follow the CAN-SPAM Act in the US and GDPR in the EU. Not following these global consumer privacy and spam laws can lead to hefty fines that can severely damage your business. For example, violating the CAN-SPAM Act in the US can cause penalties of $16000 per email. On top of this, spam violations can wreck your company’s reputation. If your company sends emails internationally, it is also important to follow the spam laws in each specific country it is sending emails to. Some countries, like Canada and Germany, have stricter spam laws than the US.
You can read more specifically about international spam laws and their implications for your company here.
Conclusion
No email marketer wants to have low deliverability rates. This can be extremely damaging to your email marketing in the long run. Nevertheless, if you follow these email deliverability best practices, you are likely to have more reach with your emails and will create the best email marketing program for your business. In our final blog post about email deliverability, look out for details on how to improve your email deliverability if it is not where you would like it to be.
Is your email marketing becoming too difficult to handle on your own? FrescoData has email marketing experts readily available to help you reach your email deliverability goals. Our company boasts a 95% deliverability rate when we send out email campaigns for clients. If your team would like to simplify its email marketing process, contact us to see how we can be of service.
