You must have come across many email marketers asking you to improve your subject lines, email body, and CTA. Well, there is a lot more to it than just these aspects to ace email marketing. Not that they are not necessary anymore, they definitely are when your email reaches your prospects’ inbox.

What if your emails don’t make it to their destination? Therefore, before optimizing your subject lines and email copy to maximize open rates and engagement rates, you need to make sure they reach your target audience’s inbox.

What is Email Deliverability?

Email delivery is different from deliverability. Do not get confused between delivery and deliverability. These two are actually two different things. First things first, so what is email deliverability? Email deliverability is also known as inbox placement, and this decides which folder of your customer’s mailbox your email will end up in. Is it going to be the inbox, spam, or promotions folder?

Email deliverability is made of three parts:

Identification:

The identification protocol ensures that you are who you are when you send an email. Things like sender policy framework (SPF), Domain Keys Identified Mails (DKIM), Domain-based Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) make sure to check you are who you claim to be in your messages.

Reputation:

Your reputation tells the ISP how trustworthy your emails are. The more the reputation better the deliverability. You must have come across the word credit score while taking a loan from a bank. Well, this is kind of similar to that. Every ISP or organization has different scores for you, and the best way to boost your reputation is when your user marks your emails as trustworthy.

Content  

The quality of your content, as well as the structure of it, has to be on point. Improper formatting and poor-quality content will decrease your email deliverability rate. Write emails that provide some actual value to your users to make an impact.

Now that we have understood email deliverability let’s get to the purpose of writing the article – how to increase email deliverability.

Improve your IP Credibility

The first thing an ISP checks about you when you send an email is your IP credibility. ISP asses the IP of an incoming email to check how trustworthy the IP is. If your IP looks fishy, then there is a high probability that your emails won’t make it to the inbox.

What must you do to avoid this?

Take it slow!

Yes, start slowly by sending emails to a closed group of engaged users. This will help slowly increase your IP credibility. How? Once an ISP begins to witness users engaging with your emails, it will gradually improve your IP’s trustworthiness.

Then with time, you can slowly increase the volume of your emails. If you haven’t already, we highly recommend you check your IP’s reputation.

Confirmed Opt-In

We know how tempting using a single opt-in box is. The number of subscribers you get is enormous, but this might hurt your email deliverability rate in the long run. Therefore, we suggest using confirmed opt-in or sometimes called double opt-in.

A double opt-in is a process where a subscriber receives a confirmation email after subscribing to your email newsletter. And in the confirmation email, they confirm that they indeed are interested in your newsletter and genuinely want to subscribe.

Using confirmed opt-in might slow down your email list building. However, it has more benefits, such as a better open rate, higher-quality leads, lower bounce rates, improved engagement, fewer unsubscribes, and, more importantly, an increased deliverability rate.

And also, it is compliant with CAN-SPAM Act which will allow you to avoid fat penalties from the federal trade commission.

Make Opting-out Easy

It is a mandate according to the CAN-SPAM data privacy guidelines and also the right thing to do. You love your customers. If yes, then when you love someone, you need to let them go. If they truly love you back, they will return to you in no time.

It is not just about letting your subscribers go; in fact, you need to make it easy for them to unsubscribe from your email newsletter. Otherwise, to avoid getting your emails further, your users might flag your emails as spam.

And getting flagged as spam is really not good for your IP’s credibility and may directly affect your deliverability rate.

You can place a unsubscribe button in an easily visible place so that people can easily unsubscribe from your newsletter hassle-free.

Use the Same Sender Name

Suppose you don’t want to be fined by FTC for violating the CAN-SPAM act and decrease your deliverability rate. In that case, we recommend you make sure that the sender’s information states precisely who you are or your company. It would be better to maintain a consistent sender name. in simple terms, avoid swapping between your email and company email.

Don’t Overwhelm your customer with your emails

It often happens that after a user subscribes to an email newsletter, the brand inundates the users with promotional emails. Before you know, the user is overwhelmed by barraging emails. This is the best way to sour your relationship with your subscriber.

When things go south with your subscribers, they will ignore your emails, resulting in a low engagement rate and reduced IP credibility. Or, sometimes, your potential customer might get annoyed by your barraging emails and end up unsubscribing, or in the worst-case scenario, they might flag your emails as spam (which you want to avoid at all costs).

So, avoid over-spending emails to your subscribers. According to a study, 90% of marketers send 1-4 emails a month. Yes! A Month. Try maintaining a frequency of 1-4 emails a month and hope everything goes well.

Maintain a Consistent Schedule

The most crucial point in this whole article is this point. It is imperative to maintain consistency in your email sending behavior. Being fickle is the best way to direct your emails towards spam folders. As we had discussed above, inundating your subscribers with your emails is not a good idea.

However, sending emails sporadically is not suitable for your brand awareness as well. Hence what you should do is figure out the right balance between sending emails too frequently and infrequently. Finding that perfect balance will require some experimenting and a lot of patience.

What you can do is try out different frequencies in three-four months, send one email in the first month, then try two the next month, then try three in the third month, and four in the fourth month. While you are at it, record your subscribers’ reactions, and whatever is working out best for you, stick to it.

Segment your List

Your subscribers don’t want to receive email blasts sent for the masses. Instead, what they wish to receive are personalized emails that address their specific problems and pain points. One of the most common and best ways to segment your email list is based on aspects like:

• Past purchases
• Location
• Position of the sales funnel
• Demographic

Segmenting your email list before rolling out your emails might be time-consuming, but trust me, it is worth it. Segmenting an email list will help you increase your engagement rate, ultimately resulting in improved deliverability.

Conclusion

Most of the time, marketers get so involved in optimizing other things like subject lines, email copy, CTAs that they forget or ignore the essential thing: making sure your email reaches your prospects’ inbox. This, I believe, is the quintessential thing about email marketing that shouldn’t be ignored.

By following the points mentioned above, we are sure that your email deliverability will hit the roof in no time. Just maintain a good IP reputation and credibility if you don’t want ISPs to send your emails to spam.