Mastering Email Deliverability: Strategies for Reaching Every Inbox

Emails are still one of the most important methods of marketing. They inform subscribers about new products, services, deals, and sales. They are also used to reach out to new prospective clients and create new subscribers.

Mastering Email Deliverability: Strategies for Reaching Every Inbox

Emails are still one of the most important methods of marketing. They inform subscribers about new products, services, deals, and sales. They are also used to reach out to new prospective clients and create new subscribers.

However, all of that really only works when your email delivery rate is high. Email deliverability refers to the number of sent emails that land in the primary inbox.

Several factors affect email deliverability, and you can optimize them to increase it. Let’s check them out.

Factors That Affect Email Delivery and How to Optimize Them

1. Improve Your Sender Reputation

Internet service providers are very strict about security and providing a good service. They vet emails to separate spam from legitimate correspondence.

The system is quite complex, but the domain sender's reputation is at its core. This is a metric tracked by ISPs, which assigns a reputation value to all email-sending domains.

The score is calculated based on the following things:

• Email open rate
• Email ignore rate
• Email moved to spam folder
• Email removed from spam folder
• Email send rate

Most of these metrics need to be low. The exceptions are open rates and removal of mail from the spam folder. So, sending too many emails that don’t get opened or land in the spam folder harms your domain’s sender reputation.

Emails from low sender reputation domains don’t get delivered to the main inbox and land automatically in the spam folder. Therefore, managing reputation is one of the most important things in improving email deliverability.

So, try to manage the metrics that affect the sender's reputation.

1. Setup Email Authentication

Email deliverability is also dependent on authentication. Email spoofing has been a huge problem for a long time. Since emails are used to contact and share sensitive information privately, they are prime targets for spoofing.

Spoofing is masquerading as someone else to dupe someone. Spoofed emails are used to steal login info such as passwords and usernames.

To combat this, security experts devised a new verification method to ensure that email-sending domains could not be spoofed. This method utilizes DNS TXT records, specifically the SPF record.

SPF stands for sender policy framework. This DNS record specifies which IP addresses can send emails on a domain’s behalf.

When an ISP receives an email from a domain, they do an SPF lookup to find out if the sender's IP address is listed in the SPF record. If the IP address is found, the email can land in the main inbox; otherwise, it is blocked or put in the spam folder.

You must set up SPF records for your domain to ensure that your emails are delivered. Also, make sure to double-check them with an SPF record checker to ensure that there are no mistakes.

1. Enhance Email Content Quality and Formatting

The email delivery rate can be enhanced by improving the email open rate. How do you do that? You do that by optimizing the email design and content.

This entails the following.

• Writing an engaging subject line
• Design the email to look engaging
• Write concisely and avoid wasting the readers' time.
• Getting to your subject matter promptly
• Providing a CTA (Call to Action)

Some personalization goes a long way here. Generic emails that use template formats and have uninspired subjects seldom get opened. This reduces the open rate and affects the sender's reputation.

As a result, a negative feedback loop forms, reducing your sender's reputation and delivery rate.

Investing in a good writer is important, as they can craft attractive subject lines and email content that drives engagement. More open rates result in a positive feedback loop where your sender reputation increases and lands you in more inboxes.

1. Maintain Regular Sending Patterns

Most people are fairly regular in how they do things. Most people follow a routine and exhibit patterns in all their hobbies and habits. These patterns extend to other parts of their life as well.

So, you can expect a person to have a set time for checking emails and catching up on other updates. You can use this tendency for habits to improve your email delivery.

By setting a specific time and date for sending your emails, you can ensure that people will routinely read them. When emails are opened and read, the domain sender's reputation increases. As such, your emails get delivered straight to the inbox instead of the spam folder.

The key point here is that you must be extremely regular. You cannot be tardy or early. You also have to maintain a healthy frequency of sending emails. If you send too few, you risk losing the interest of your audience. Send too many, and you risk sparking their ire.

A good frequency is once a week, but that is subjective. It depends on your niche, type of audience, and what you hope to achieve with email marketing. Experiment to find the optimal sending rate and maintain it for the best results.

1. Maintain Clean Email Lists

Most email marketers have a mailing list. A mailing list is an index of email addresses from your audience. Typically, a mailing list is formed when people sign up on your websites and platforms and provide you with their email addresses. However, some services sell mailing lists to companies.

You can use both lists now, but the former is far better for engagement and maintaining the sender's reputation. Here’s why.

• Bought mailing lists often have unresponsive recipients
• Many email addresses in a list are dead because the account has been lost or forgotten.
• Bought mailing lists have trap accounts that ISPs use to find companies who buy such lists.

So, if you send emails to unresponsive recipients, your sender's reputation and, by extension, deliverability will suffer.

This does not mean the list you created can’t have these problems. Unresponsive clients can occur anywhere, so you must remove such recipients from your list to maintain your reputation and deliverability. This is known as maintaining a clean email list.

1. Handle Subscriber Requests and Demands Promptly

One thing that everyone hates is clinginess. Some companies and brands, in a misguided attempt to create more conversions, cling to any and all of their subscribers.

They make it difficult for people to unsubscribe from their mailing lists. They include multiple cumbersome steps to discourage the recipients from unsubscribing.

So, what happens after that? The recipient simply ignores all emails sent from such brands. They can also block them so all correspondence goes to the spam folder.

Naturally, that results in a terrible email delivery rate and tarnishes the sender's reputation.

This is why managing your subscribers and providing an easy method for unsubscribing is important. If their interest reignites, they will re-subscribe on their own.

Just cut your losses to avoid tanking your email deliverability.

1. Analyze Email Results and Engagement

Part of any strategy is its analysis. When you are engaging in an email marketing campaign, you must check its results at least once every week. Check how many people are engaging with your emails.

Analyze why certain recipients are not engaging with your emails. Try to use different subject lines and content with them. Drop them from your mailing list if they still don’t bite.

Any email service provider worth their salt will provide some methods for easy analysis of your email campaigns. So, check your engagement and open rates and make the necessary changes to improve them.

Conclusion

So, there you have it, mastering email deliverability. By applying these strategies, you can dramatically increase your email deliverability. Most of these strategies just require common sense and respect for your audience. As long as you have that, you will be fine.