Email deliverability is extremely important for marketers. Email continues to be one of the most cost-effective marketing channels, with more ROI coming from email than most other digital channels—including social media, digital advertising, and paid search. With trillions of emails sent out every year, it is important to optimize your email marketing content and personalize your email campaigns. That way your emails will resonate with your audience.
If your email campaigns do not reach your recipient’s inboxes though, then all the effort you put into your developing your email marketing content will be wasted. Nothing is worse than crafting a highly targeted and impactful email campaign that lands in spam folders. Poor email deliverability is the cause of this problem. It can cause damage to your company’s reputation, impact the trust others have in your brand and reflects poorly on your business as a whole. This is why understanding email deliverability is so important.
There are simple mistakes that marketers can make with their email marketing content that will lead their email campaigns to land in spam folders. By understanding what these email marketing content mistakes are, you can avoid making them altogether. In the following sections, we will go over 6 factors that affect your email deliverability.
Low Engagement Rates
Emails with low open rates can trigger spam filters. This
can lead your email campaigns to be marked as spam when they shouldn’t be. The
leading cause of low open rates is emails being deleted without being opened.
Many large email providers have acknowledged that this action contributes
toward emails from specific senders being moved to the spam folder.
In order to boost engagement, and reduce the amount of
emails that end up in the spam folder, follow these tips:
- Keep your subject lines short and sweet.
- If your open rates are low, reduce the amount of emails you send out. Remember, quality over quantity.
- Ensure you send your emails at the optimal time for your audience. Test various times throughout the day to see which time is best for you.
- Regularly cleanse your email list to remove old, inactive accounts.
- Segment your email list and send personalized campaigns to the different groups you create.
Using Misleading Subject Lines
If a user clicks on an email with a misleading subject line, this can cause them to lose trust in your brand. It can also cause them to mark your emails as spam. This can be detrimental to your business as less of your audience receive your emails. Plus, sending emails like this is a violation of American anti-spam laws.
The US CAN-SPAM Act put rules in place to minimize spam in the US. Deceptive headlines are one of the things the act is against. Sending emails with misleading subject lines is not only bad for your email marketing strategy, it can lead to fines of up to $41,484.
Incorporating Spam Trigger Words
With advances in AI, spam filters are becoming extremely
sophisticated. This means it is imperative that you do not use spam trigger
words in the subject lines of your campaigns. Fail to do this and your emails
can end up in the spam folder.
Some of the most common spam trigger words include:
- Congratulations
- Click here
- Dear friend
- Risk free
- This isn’t spam
- Order now
- Increase sales
Not Using a Reliable Email Service Provider
Your emails risk being not reaching your audience’s inboxes if you use an IP address associated with spam. A reliable email marketing service provider will deliver your emails through their servers and ensure the IP address used to send the campaign is not associated with spam. The provider you choose should have a strong anti-spam policy and have a trustworthy reputation. Some examples of good providers include Mailchimp and Constant Contact.
Having a Poor-Quality List
At FrescoData, we champion regular database enhancement to
ensure high deliverability on your campaigns. Poor list quality can be caused
by:
- Spam tramps, which are email addresses that do
not belong to active users. Instead they are used by Internet Service
Providers—the services that send your emails—to identify spammers and senders
with poor data management. - Unknown users, which are users that never
existed, were terminated by an email provider or were abandoned by the original
user. - Inactive users, customers on your list who have
not interacted with your emails in a long time. You can try to re-engage these
users, but if they continue to not respond, you should remove them from your
email list.
Remember, having a smaller more engaged email list is better than having a large one with a disengaged audience. This is why regular database enhancement is a critical component of email marketing.
Not Including an Unsubscribe Link
Your content can be amazing, helpful and relevant for your
audience, but it might not reach them if you do not include an unsubscribe link
in your emails. Not only can this practice lead to spam complaints, you can get
fined for CAN-SPAM noncompliance. This is also an important factor in GDPR, the
consumer privacy directive in the EU.
When a user sends a request for deletion from your list, you
must honor it within 10 business days. This is another reason to use an email
service provider since many remove users from your list for you if they choose
to unsubscribe.
Conclusion
Having low email deliverability can be tough. It can
severely hurt the effectiveness of your marketing with your audience. It is
important to maintain high email deliverability because email remains most
revenue boosting marketing channel online. By understanding what can ruin your
email deliverability, you can save your marketing team a lot of headaches. Next
week, look out for a blog post containing best practices to boost your email
deliverability with your audience.
Are you overwhelmed by email deliverability? FrescoData is a
leading expert in email marketing that regularly sends campaigns with a 95%
email deliverability rate. If you think your team has been sending campaigns
that are ruining your email deliverability, reach out so we can optimize your
campaigns for better performance and reach with your audience.
