Email Marketing remains one of the best platforms in the digital age for small business to communicate with their audience. With an average ROI of $36 per dollar invested, this type of marketing strategy is not an uncommon practice. But a large portion of your email campaigns relies not only on content and design, but also on whether or not your emails arrive in the inboxes of your users. In this post, we’ll dive into some key strategies to increase your email deliverability and hence your ROI.
Understanding Email Deliverability
Email deliverability is a concept in which your email messages arrive in your recipients’ inbox without being filtered into spam folders or bounced back. Good deliverability means that more emails are delivered to your target audience, which results in higher engagement, conversion, and return on investment.
Tips for Improving Email Deliverability
1. Build a Quality Email List
Email deliverability relies on a healthy, active email list. It’s easy to purchase or rent lists to quickly grow your subscriber count, but you’ll often receive suboptimal engagement and damage your sender reputation. Rather, go with organic growth by giving away free lead magnets such as ebooks, webinars, or discounts to woo potential subscribers into freely registering.
When you make a list, keep your list up to date. You need to regularly purge your list by removing inactive subscribers and people who haven’t opened your emails in a while. High open and click-through rates give your email provider (ESP) a signal that your content is useful and wanted, so you can improve deliverability.
2. Verify Email Addresses
After you start collecting emails, you’ll need to make sure that those addresses are valid. With a powerful email verifying tool you can verify email addresses before adding them to your list. This proactive move eliminates sending to false accounts, thus lowering your bounce rates. A low bounce rate not only helps you keep your sender score clean, but also ensures that your emails get sent to inboxes rather than spam folders. When you deliver emails to a limited number of verified, active addresses, you build a reputation with email providers and increase deliverability.
3. Choose a Proven Email Provider.
Your email provider choice can make a big difference to your email deliverability. If you are looking for an ESP, try one that has a reputation for high deliverability and customer service. List segmentation, automations, and analytics are also useful features to take advantage of when it comes to tailoring your emails. A reputable ESP typically has relationships with large ISPs and can better manage challenging deliverability issues. This makes it less likely that you’ll run into issues with sending limits or spam filters.
4. Optimize Your Sender Reputation
It’s all about your sender reputation because it plays a role in whether your email will end up in the inbox or the spam folder. There are a number of factors that affect your sender profile, such as bounce rates, engagement rates and complaint rates. When sending out emails, always focus on quality rather than quantity in order to maximise your reputation. Personalize your emails so that they make sense for you and provide relevant, useful content.
Additionally, keeping track of your email metrics on a regular basis can tell you where you need to improve. Use tools that allow you to measure your sender scoring and describe issues that might hinder your deliverability. Seeing your reputation decline could mean you should change tactics, such as tweaking your email content or rethinking your targeting.
5. Craft Compelling Subject Lines
Your Subject line is the first thing readers read. An engaging and clear subject line will increase open rates, reminding ISPs that your emails are worth hitting the inbox. You should not write all capital letters or excessive punctuation, as this may trigger spam filters.
6. Provide Valuable Content
Your emails need to have content that is valuable to your audience. Customize your content based on user behavior, interests and demographics. More relevant content means more clicks which not only improves your sender profile but also increases conversion rate.
7. Test and Optimize
Always experiment with elements of your email campaigns, such as subject lines, content, time of send, and CTAs. A/B testing can be helpful here. Also consider segmenting your email lists into subsets, so you can target your campaigns more effectively and personalize them.
8. Monitor Your Metrics
The bounce rate, open rate, click-through and unsubscribe rate all tell us something about your emails. Track these metrics with analytics software and check if they’re showing poor performance. Change your strategies accordingly in order to stay a reliable sender and ensure better deliverability.
9. Keep Frequency and Timing in Mind.
You need to find the balance between frequency and timing. Too many emails will also annoy readers, increasing unsubscribe rates and less reader engagement. On the other hand, sending too little will cost you opportunities. Follow your audience’s actions and determine the frequency and time of sending to get the most responses.
Conclusion:
If you’re a small business and you want to get the best ROI, you should dedicate time and resources to improving email deliverability. By assembling an email list, optimizing your content, segmenting your audience, and doing the basics in email authentication and compliance, you can enhance your probability of reaching out to your audience. Likewise, the more deliverable it is, the higher engagement, conversions, and marketing performance you will achieve. When you’re in a race against the clock, following these tips can differentiate your small business and enable you to achieve your vision faster.
