8 Ways to Improve Email Deliverability

Email marketing remains a powerful and cost-effective marketing channel for engaging prospects and customers. But without giving proper attention to deliverability, sometimes even relevant, permission-based emails can get filtered out of subscribers’ inboxes.

Deliverability is the term used to classify the percentage of emails that actually make it into the intended recipients’ inboxes. According to Return Path’s Email Intelligence Report, 14% of permission-based email in North America and 22% worldwide never reaches an inbox. Although that might not sound like an overly alarming number, for marketers, any contact that fails to receive your email marketing messages is one too many.

Deliverability can be a result of many different factors—some which are beyond your control—but there are some practical steps that marketers can take to build a good reputation, improve their deliverability rate and maximize the effectiveness of their email marketing campaigns. Here are 8 tips that can help you improve your email marketing deliverability.

1. Send to contacts that expect to receive your emails

A good rule of thumb for email marketing is to only send emails to people who want and expect to receive your email: customers, partners and other contacts who have opted in via web subscriptions, downloads or other form fills. You should aim to grow your lists organically, as purchased and rented lists can often lead to a negative impact on your reputation and less than stellar results.
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Also, don’t take advantage of your subscribers. If they opted-in to receive a certain type of email from you (e.g. weekly blog update), don’t just assume that they’d also like to start receiving tons of other messages (e.g. promotional emails or content offers). It’s also helpful to use a subscription management option to give recipients the ability to opt out of certain types of emails, without having to opt out altogether.

2. Perform proper list maintenance

Maintaining a solid contact list plays a critical role in ensuring high email deliverability. You want to keep your list free of invalid, mistyped and otherwise undeliverable email addresses that bounce when an email is sent to them. ISP’s track what percentage of your emails bounce and a high percentage says that your lists are not clean. The general best practice is to regularly scrub your lists of invalid and inactive contacts. As with many things in marketing, quality is preferred to quantity.

3. Monitor response rates

Staying on top of your email response rates is not just fundamental to understanding and optimizing your email marketing performance, but it also can play a role in improving your email deliverability as well. You’ll want to keep a close eye on your delivery rates, bounces (hard-bounces and soft-bounces), unsubscribes, complaints, opens and click-throughs, so you can spot any patterns or discrepancies and respond accordingly. If your results suddenly drop off, you’ll want to investigate to see what might be the cause and make adjustments. Consistently low response rates suggest that your content or list (or both) are bad and will lead to higher delete rates, which will affect your reputation and delivery.

4. Focus on engaged subscribers

Subscriber engagement metrics are becoming a key factor in an ISP’s spam filtering determination process. One way to improve your engagement metric is to focus your email marketing efforts on contacts that have recently responded to your emails. You could create a segment of a particular list based on recent open and click activity during a particular time period, such as the past 30, 60 or 90 days and send your email only to that engaged segment.

According to George Bilbrey, Return Path co-founder and president, “Senders that consistently reach the inbox tend to have higher read rates and more active subscribers. Senders whose mail is ignored – deleted without being read – are often the ones who struggle to get their messages delivered.” The point is, consistently sending emails to uninterested contacts (who are more likely to report your email as spam) that consistently ignore your emails, hurts your reputation metrics, and will ultimately hinder you from reaching people that are interested.

5. Create relevant and engaging emails

While bad content alone won’t necessarily prevent your emails from being delivered, it will certainly lead to a high rate of unopens, unsubscribes, and spam complaints—all of which do impact future deliverability. It should go without saying, but your mission should be to send quality, relevant and helpful email content to your contacts. After all, the more relevant and engaging your content is, the more successful your email marketing efforts will be.

6. Setup DKIM Authentication

Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) is an authentication protocol used to verify the emails you send out using an ESP. It’s like a digital signature that tells receiving email servers that your email is actually coming from you. It can help you establish and underscore the authenticity of your email, which will help improve delivery. With an increasing number of illegitimate senders attempting to spam, all ISPs are cracking down on illegitimate senders and enhancing their authentication protocols so authentication is vital.

7. Play by the rules

The Federal CAN-SPAM law introduced a number of rules regarding the sending of commercial email. In a nutshell, it requires that all emails have a valid postal mailing address listed and a working unsubscribe link that promptly blocks the recipient from receiving future messages. Making sure you’re in compliance with these and other CAN-SPAM rules is critical. Failing to do so will not only affect your sender reputation, but could result in fines.

8. Choose a solid email marketing platform

As email deliverability continues to become more and more complex, it’s important to choose an email marketing or marketing automation vendor that has an established track record and the sophistication to help you navigate the ever-changing landscape. While much of deliverability rests on you the sender, the business processes and reputation of the email service provider you use also affect it.

At the end of the day, email deliverability is all about working to ensure that your permission-based email is delivered to the intended recipient. And while achieving 100% deliverability might be a stretch, following these best practices can go a long way to helping you get closer to that goal.