The 5 Best Ways to Ensure Email Deliverability

As a digital marketer, you are well aware that email is one of the most important parts of your overall strategy.

You know that your email deliverability needs to be the absolute best it can be to maximize the success of your marketing campaigns. Email marketing experts have been sharing tips and tricks on countless blogs about improving deliverability rates. Their “hacks” could be creating a shorter, more enticing call to action in the subject line, or changing your approach to mail stream segmentation and optimizing for mobile.

Of course it’s great to follow the guidelines that email marketers are blogging about, but your work doesn’t stop there. While you’re executing all of these great strategies to guarantee email deliverability, be sure not to forget the fundamentals.

Here are five of the most efficient ways to help you ensure that your email program has a high deliverability rate:

1) Clarify your recipients’ expectations when you collect their addresses.  

Do not leave your recipients in the dark about what kind of emails they are going to receive from you and how often they are going to receive them. Clearly communicate exactly what they can expect to receive in their inbox from you at the very beginning.

Everyone’s inboxes are flooded, and your recipients won’t be shy about marking your messages as spam if they were not anticipating emails from you. When you are transparent with your recipients about how frequently they will get mail from you, they are much less likely to get frustrated and want your messages to disappear. Better yet, allow your recipients to choose how frequently they want to get your emails. If they only want your monthly e-newsletter, respect that.

2) Never buy, rent, scrape, share, or co-register addresses. 

Purchasing email lists is never a good idea. Your recipients need to explicitly decide that they want your messages in their inboxes. If you want a receptive audience and don’t want your messages to automatically be marked as spam, there is no other way than to have the people on your list opt in to get your email.

Ideally, your recipients should look forward to your emails because they’ve heard of your company and they’re interested in your product or service. It seems like common sense, but you would be amazed by how many businesses still default on bad email practices because they’re desperate to get their emails out to as many recipients as possible. Take it from us: buying, renting, scraping, sharing and co-registering addresses will backfire, and it’s not worth the money or hassle.

3) Don’t send to recipients who are not engaging with your emails.

We recommend that after it’s been over three months of no engagement, you should give your recipients a break. You might be hesitant to admit it, but our reasoning makes total sense. Do you think anyone who ignores you for 12 straight weeks is going to be happy to see your emails still arriving in his or her inbox? At least reduce your email frequency significantly if you are completely insistent on continuing your email campaign as-is.

You don’t have to cut off communication all at once. You can always gradually decrease your frequency until you feel that it’s time to stop sending completely. Whatever you do, don’t pass the 6 month threshold of no engagement. Remember, it’s your company’s reputation at stake. You’re not doing anyone any favors by incessantly sending emails to people who delete them right away. Don’t self-sabotage out of stubbornness!

4) Give users an easy way out.

It might seem counterintuitive, but you should always provide users with an easy-to-find and simple way to leave your mailing list. You’re not fooling anyone but yourself if you think that “hiding” your unsubscribe button is preventing people from unsubscribing. All you will receive from a tiny, hidden unsubscribe link is an annoyed recipient and a higher chance of recipients defaulting to the Report Spam button.

Also, you’re not doing yourself any favors by dishonoring your promise to actually take them off the list. Your unsubscribe process should be trustworthy and seamless. You definitely don’t want to jeopardize your reputation and ruin your deliverability rate by being shady. Plus, even if a customer unsubscribes, they’re more likely to re-subscribe if you gave them an easy way to unsubscribe in the first place.

5) Be flexible.

When you adjust your sending strategy according to the changing circumstances of your audience, everyone wins. Stay on top of monitoring the opens, clicks, spam reports, and unsubscribes of your email campaigns. Keep an eye out for campaigns, segments, and mail streams that are underperforming, and take the appropriate action.

You need to be resilient and implement creative, strategic solutions when you notice your email campaign is not going as planned. Instead of just sending the same kinds of emails in the hopes that something will eventually improve, be proactive. Do you need to tweak your subject line or content?  Do you need to adjust your sending frequency or segmentation?

It pays off to be cognizant of your email marketing practices.

Email marketing is an integral part of every outbound digital campaign. It’s certainly useful to optimize your email templates and tailor your messaging to make it as personalized for your recipients as possible. At the same time, you can’t neglect these five key strategies to help you guarantee solid deliverability rates. If you want to avoid headaches over deliverability problems and prepare your business for a scalable email marketing program, you can’t cut any corners.

Are you looking to make an impact with your organization’s email marketing strategy? Want to learn more about Chainlink Platform’s cutting edge tools that can power your automated multi-channel campaigns? Request a demo of our platform today!