You might have never heard of email deliverability. But we are sure you have felt its effects on your email marketing strategy. Did you know nearly half of the world’s email traffic is tagged as spam? Those could be your emails in there.
High email deliverability rates are crucial for the success of your campaigns. After all, you could have all the best subject lines and images, but if your emails land in the spam folder, all your hard work goes to waste.
This is the second article in a three-part series to demystify email marketing in Canada. Learn here how to ensure your messages are going to your audience’s inboxes — and not the junk folder.
What is Email Deliverability?
Email deliverability is how often an email from you reaches the recipient's inbox. The average deliverability in 2024 is 83.1%, according to a study by Email Tool Tester with 15 ESP.
- A good email deliverability rate: over 89%
- An excellent email deliverability rate: over 95%
- A poor email deliverability rate: below 80%
Why You Should Care About Your Deliverability Rate
If your emails don’t reach your audience’s inbox, you won’t get the results you need from your email campaigns. It’s that simple. When an ESP tags your email as spam, there’s no great subject that will change that.
With good email deliverability, you have a higher chance of reaching your target ROI. Plus, a higher open rates and a good sender reputation.
How to Avoid the Spam Filters
Keep Your Contact List Healthy
A nice and clean email list is the foundation of good deliverability. To keep yours healthy and engaged, do the following:
- Use a double opt-in process to confirm subscriptions. This ensures that the subscribers genuinely want to receive your emails.
- Clean your list by removing inactive subscribers who haven't engaged with your emails for a while. Focus on your conversion and engagement rates, not solely on the number of contacts on the list. Before cutting them out, consider a re-engagement campaign before purging them.
- Segmenting your list helps you to send more targeted emails, which can improve engagement rates and reduce spam complaints.
Authenticate your sender’s domain
Email authentication helps ESPs know that your emails are legitimate and not spam. Make sure you follow the procedure to add these protocols to your domain’s DNS panel:
- SPF (Sender Policy Framework): Ensures your emails are sent from authorized servers.
- DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail): Adds a digital signature to your emails to verify they haven't been altered.
- DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance): Provides instructions to ISPs on how to handle emails that fail SPF or DKIM checks.
Create Relevant and Engaging Content
Your email content can have a great impact on whether your emails are marked as spam. To avoid that, personalize your recipient’s name and tailor content based on their preferences and behaviour.
Every little part of your email counts to ensure it will safely reach your audience’s inbox. So, balance the amount of images and text in your mailings. If you use too many images, ESPs can flag your email as spam.
Also, have clear and engaging subject lines that are not click-baiting and spammy words, such as “urgent” and “free”.
Optimize for Mobile
A significant portion of emails is opened on mobile devices (almost 42%). Ensuring your emails are mobile-friendly can improve engagement rates. Before hitting “send” campaigns, check if your email works well in different screen sizes and keep your subject line short to improve user experience.
If you’re using Cyberimpact as your email marketing platform, you can check that straight from the email editor.
Monitor and Improve Your Sender Reputation
Keep track of your campaign metrics — open rate, click rate and spam complaints —; and at the same time, take steps to have a good sender reputation and a low spam score.
If you notice drops in your engagement or an increase in spam complaints, study what could be the source of that change and improve your strategy.
Do Not Buy Email Lists
Starting an email list from scratch is not easy, we know. However, purchased lists often contain spam traps and low-quality addresses. This can greatly damage your reputation with ESPs, causing a big dent in your email deliverability rate.
Avoiding spam and having high deliverability are key to your email marketing success. When you follow these best practices you can save time (and money) with your short and long-term goals.
Speaking of saving time, in the next and final post of our series, we will dive into how to nurture leads using marketing automation. This can help you take your email marketing strategy to the next level by automating your campaigns to deliver personalized messages to your leads.