Email remains the most effective online marketing method and delivers $42 for each dollar spent. Email deliverability, however, is very much an essential part of email marketing campaigns success. Email deliverability is the ability of an email to successfully reach the intended recipient’s inbox. Server-clicks play an important role in determining deliverability. In this article, I want to clear the confusion of deliverability by addressing server-clicks and their significance in email marketing.
Understanding Deliverability
Prior to understanding server-clicks, it is essential to understand email deliverability. In simple words, email deliverability is the probability that an email reaches a recipient’s inbox instead of ending up in a spam folder or being bounced. It is based on many factors, such as sender trust, authentication, list hygiene, content quality, and engagement rates.
Email deliverability is essential to the overall success of any email marketing campaign. Even if you’ve got a good email list and interesting content, deliverability issues will cancel everything out. This is where metrics such as server-clicks come into play.
What are Server-Clicks?
Server-clicks, also known as server-side clicks or backend clicks, are actions taken at the email server level, and not the user’s behaviour. These clicks are typically recorded by the email provider (ESP) and refer to automated processes that occur on the server side after an email campaign has been delivered.
When an email is opened, backend functions can be triggered that allow providers to measure engagement, including:
Link Validation: The server validates that the links in the email are accessible. We need to make sure that the recipients will have great user experiences once they click through.
Tracking Images/Links: The vast majority of email marketers use tracking pixels or URLs to measure engagement. When an email opens, these tracking attributes tell the server that a user has opened an email-despite it not entering the user’s mind.
Spam Filtering: ISPs filter their email on a regular basis to protect their reputations. Depending on the style and content of the email, and perhaps even a sender’s name, those scans can dramatically impact whether or not the email ends up in your inbox or goes straight to the spam folder.
Bots: Harmful or otherwise, bots open and/or interact with emails, misleading aggregate data along the way. These can simulate clicks and opens, which makes user behavior harder to analyze.
Server-Clicks for Email Marketing: What’s The Importance of Server-Clicks?
1. Improved Email Deliverability
ESPs use engagement metrics like open, click-through, and conversion to assess whether an email is relevant and spammy. Server-clicks are real-time engagement information that enables ESPs to deliver relevant, spam-free emails directly to users’ inboxes. Furthermore, high server-click rates mean that users appreciate the email content, which leads ESPs to push other email messages from the same sender to the inbox.
2. Faster Campaign Analysis
Server-clicks provide real-time insight into user engagement, which allows marketers to see the effectiveness of their email campaigns at a much earlier time. The marketer can leverage server-click data to tweak emails and campaigns — including subject lines, email content, and call-to-actions — to maximize engagement and campaign performance.
3. Increased Conversion Rates
Server-clicks provide marketers with insights into how users engage with their ads so they can convert email campaigns. Marketers, for example, can analyze server-click data to discover the most clicked links and convert them with simple calls-to-action, engaging images and engaging copy.
4. Enhanced User Experience
Server-clicks enable the best possible user experience by speeding up the time taken for a page to load after a user clicks a link in an email. This is because server-clicks loads the page on the server before the user clicks on the link, allowing the page to load more quickly on the client side.
Server-Clicks Best Practices for Email Marketing: What To Do When Your EDM Requires A Server-Click?
Select a Reliable Email Service Provider:
It’s essential to choose an ESP that you trust and will deliver on server-click rates. An ESP with high levels of automation must have a powerful tracking tool that accurately logs server-clicks and gives engagement information in real-time. The ESP should also have a solid reputation for deliverability and email marketing regulations, which ensures that the emails are delivered to the intended users and will not get flagged as spam.
How to Improve Email Content for Usage:
Converting email to users is essential for server-click conversion. Marketers should use witty and compelling subject lines, sales copy, targeted imagery, and concise CTA’s to get readers to open links in an email. Personalization, like sending a personalized note with the recipient’s name as a subject line can also boost engagement.
Monitor Server-Click Rates:
Checking server-click levels helps us understand where we can improve our email campaigns. It is crucial for marketers to keep an eye on server-click rates and check it against client-side clicks to find inconsistencies and adjust their email campaigns accordingly to ensure higher click through rates. For instance, if the server-side click rate is below the client-side click rate, then it means that links in the email aren’t working or the client-side webpage is not loading.
Test Email Campaigns:
Email campaigns should be tested to make sure server-clicks are captured and the page renders correctly on the client-side. Marketers must validate their emails across devices and email clients to make sure that server-clicks are accurately tracked and the page loads correctly. This is particularly relevant with the rise in email consumption by mobile devices.
Use UTM Parameters:
When marketers add UTM fields to email links, they can monitor server-clicks more closely, determining which links were clicked and from where. This can offer valuable feedback on how users have behaved and can be used to guide future email campaign optimizations.
Conclusion:
Server-clicks, in short, are one of the most important metrics for email deliverability as it gives ESPs real-time data on engagement that can help them send relevant and spam-free emails to inboxes. Also, server-clicks gives marketers great insights into user habits, allowing marketers to optimise their email marketing for conversion and better UX. If marketers adhere to the guidelines outlined in this paper, they can increase their server-click rate and unleash the full potential of email campaigns.
