Email deliverability is influenced by several factors that determine whether or not your emails are delivered effectively. One crucial step is to avoid spam filters to increase the success of your email marketing efforts.
But how can you ensure your emails get to your subscribers’ inboxes instead of being filtered out?
In this post, we’ll look at the elements that influence your email campaigns, as well as what email mistakes you need to avoid to improve your odds of having high-quality email deliverability.
5 Ways to Increase Email Deliverability
The previous engagement with your emails determines whether or not your current email campaigns will reach your subscribers’ inboxes.
If they’ve opened and clicked on your past emails, they’re more likely to open and click on your next one. If they’ve deleted them without opening them, your most recent campaigns are more likely to end up in the spam bin.
So, how can you ensure that your subscribers open your emails and that their inbox providers get clear signals about the quality of your content?
1. Only Email People in your List Using a Familiar ‘From’ Name.
Organically created lists have a five times better open rate and receive four times fewer spam complaints than purchased lists.
Increased opens and fewer spam complaints are favorable indications in the eyes of email providers, ensuring that your campaigns reach your subscribers’ inboxes.
An email list may be created by combining a valuable incentive like an ebook or a free trial with a solid sign-up form. Moosend has various tools to help you create a sign-up form to build your lists.
If you have difficulties increasing the subscribers on your list, follow these best email newsletter signup form tips to get ahead of the game. Now that we have a list, we need to consider the ‘From’ name when sending a campaign.
Because opening an email campaign sends strong positive signals to email providers, the ‘From’ name is an essential part of your email campaigns to optimize.
So, what’s the right option?
The secret to success is to choose a name that your subscribers will recognize as the ‘From’ address.
Consider what would happen if you signed up for a Moosend email newsletter. Would you be surprised if you got emails from ‘Moosend’ or ‘Alex Johnson’?
Given that you signed up through the Moosend website, it’s probably the first, even if Alex is the one who creates and sends them.
You can also use the business email of a person (for example, alex@moosend.com) so that the recipient can see the sender and adjust the ‘From’ name using a twist.
A great example would be: “Alex from Moosend “
2. Leverage Suppression Lists.
You have to communicate with your most engaged users first as a marketer. It’s a robust approach to establish a positive sender reputation while also reaping the benefits of your most devoted subscribers opening and clicking your emails.
As another strategy to improve sender reputation and deliverability, we urge clients not to send to inactive subscribers as you can risk ending up in the spam folder.
So, what role do suppression lists play in all of this?
While you may suppress for anything, including age, gender, and prior purchases, inactive suppression helps you target your inactive subscribers and prevent them from affecting your deliverability.
Although there is no particular length of time to wait before suppressing an inactive subscriber, you can always practice the following strategy: the higher your send frequency, the shorter the time before you need to suppress.
Inactive suppression is more of an art than a science, requiring a delicate balance between suppressing enough to avoid ISP bulking while maintaining a significant number of subscribers on your list.
When you’re on the right track with suppression, you’ll notice:
- High deliverability at 100%
- Increase in Open rates and click rates
- Complaint rates are down
If you don’t see any progress, you should change your suppression rules, usually by making them stricter (a shorter inactivity period before suppression).
Suppression lists are an excellent tool to keep your deliverability high and avoid disengaged subscribers. If you want to take it to the next level and improve your deliverability, even more, you should start cleaning your list.
3. Cleanse your Email List Regularly
So, what’s the difference between cleansing and suppressing your list, and why should you choose one over the other?
Suppression lists aren’t as permanent as cleansing lists, but they can be the initial step in improving your list. List cleaning is effective and, most importantly, long-lasting.
Cleaning up your list of inactive subscribers will increase your open rates, but it will also decrease your open volume. But, before we go too far ahead of ourselves, let’s take a look at what list cleansing entails.
After some trial and error with suppression lists, let’s say you understand that suppressing inactive subscribers after 90 days produces the best results for increasing engagement without reducing your list size too much.
But before that, you need to play your last card. Send a re-engagement series to your subscribers as a final step before removing them from your list.
Only send to people who haven’t opened or clicked in over 90 days. You can easily do that by creating automation in an email newsletter platform to work on autopilot.
After that re-engagement campaign, you should remove any subscribers who do not open or click within the next 30 days. Cleansing your list in such a way will improve your email deliverability as you have a list full of an engaged audience.
4. Pay Attention to your ISP Distribution.
Knowing your subscriber list’s ISP distribution won’t help you improve your deliverability, but it will help you better understand your inbox and craft your content accordingly.
What is considered spammy content by one ISP may not be regarded as spammy by another.
The methodology of spam detection varies by ISP. It’s also crucial to understand your distribution to determine how your performance measures relate to each other.
Assume your engagement rates on Gmail are lower than on other ISPs. You’ll want to adopt a stricter suppression list and list cleansing restrictions specific to Gmail in such a situation.
Instead of eliminating inactive subscribers after 90 days, you could try to cleanse your list after 60 days and start your win-back campaign 30 days earlier, too.
For this tip to work, you need to pay attention to your dashboard and reportings to make data-driven decisions and try different tactics to improve email deliverability. It all boils down to trial and error to find what works best for your campaigns.
5. Segment by IP and Subdomain
Some emails, such as transactional emails, have a high level of urgency for subscribers. This kind of communication, such as receipts and password resets, has an average of eight times more opens and clicks.
However, the average send volume of these emails isn’t that high.
Promotional emails, on the other hand, are more vital campaigns to marketers than they are to subscribers, while the open rate of just 20% is considered a success for these emails.
When it comes to engagement filtering, if you have a small amount of transactional email mixed with many promotional emails, the promotional email may trigger ISPs to block your content, reducing the deliverability of your transactional emails.
What is the reason for this?
Promotional emails have lesser interaction; thus, they can harm your sender’s reputation. Deliverability suffers when the sender’s reputation is low, and as a result, several emails will end up in the spam folder.
The solution to that is to send from many IP addresses and subdomains. Then, the sender reputation of one does not affect the sender reputation of the other in this scenario.
So, how can you send both emails without jeopardizing one’s deliverability?
The solution is to send transactional emails from one IP and subdomain while sending promotional emails from another IP and subdomain.
With this strategy, you won’t endanger the deliverability of one email type owing to the engagement levels if you use multiple IPs and subdomains for different email types.
So, even if your promotional email open rates drop, you’ll know that your subscribers will still be able to get those critical transactional emails.
Takeaways
Email marketing is a great channel every marketer should consider but they don’t think about avoiding spam filters. However, it has a significant impact on the results of your campaigns and provides your company an edge over competitors.
When you go about implementing your email marketing campaigns, keep some of the advice from this guide in mind. Send to permission-based email lists, leverage suppression lists, and always cleanse your lists from unwanted subscribers.
Apart from that, pay attention to your data and ISP distribution, and last but not least, segment by IP and subdomain to ensure that your crucial emails get in your subscribers’ inbox.
A great solution is to use email automation to help you deal with all these tasks easier and on one platform.
Not only will this enhance your email’s open and click-through rates, but it will also convey clear signals to email providers, ensuring that all future campaigns you send to your subscribers land in the inbox.
Until the next one, keep optimizing.