Email Deliverability: Make Sure You’re Hitting Inboxes

Did you know that an average 20% of marketing emails never make it to a contacts inbox?

This is why it is important to work on improving your email deliverability so your emails are actually reaching your contacts and not a brick wall. Today we’ll help you take action to ensure more of your emails are reaching their intended destinations.

What is Email Deliverability?

Email deliverability is anything that stops your emails from reaching your contacts inboxes.

Why would they not reach your user’s inbox?

This could be because of a number of reasons which we will go through in a lot more detail later on in the blog post.

Such things could be because you have a low sender score or because you don’t regularly cleanse your email list.

Removing contacts that have been inactive for over a year can actually increase your email deliverability rate by 3 to 5%.

Pretty neat eh?

So What is Stopping Emails from Being Delivered?

There are two main reasons why your emails aren’t landing in your contact’s inboxes. They are:

1. Email bounces
2. Anti-spam measure

It is well worth knowing which email providers have the higher delivery rate:

2% of emails sent to Windows Live Hotmail addresses arrive in the recipient’s inbox

7% of emails sent to Gmail addresses arrive in the recipient’s inbox

3% of emails sent to Yahoo addresses arrive in the recipient’s inbox

8% of emails sent to AOL addresses arrive in the recipient’s inbox

Email Bounces

An email bounce is when an email does not reach a contacts inbox for whatever reason.

There are a number of reasons why an email can bounce such as, the email address was incorrect or mistyped, the email address no longer exists or because of technical issues.

The average bounce rate for those who have 500 contacts in there is 2%.

Those who have 1,000 contacts in their list should have an average bounce rate of 1.6%. Those that have more than 1,000 contacts should have a bounce rate of 1.2%. These are all averages based on all industries.

If your average bounce rate is higher than these, it may be a sign that you need to cleanse your email list.

Anti-Spam Measures

Another main reason your email deliverability may be low is because of anti-spam measures your contacts email providers have.

Email providers make it their mission to stop any spam mail reaching their customers inboxes as it also has an effect on their relationship with their customers.

The good news is that you can take steps to improve your sender score and other factors so that your emails won’t be stopped by these anti-spam measures.

So How Do You Improve Your Email Deliverability?

The biggest factors in improving your email deliverability are cleansing your email list, sending relevant emails and building your sender score.

According to Econsultancy, 64% of marketers said they saw improvements after cleansing their email list, 52% said they have seen improvements after optimising their emails to make them more relevant, and 42% said they saw improvements after building their sender reputation and score.

Build Your IP Reputation

You need to build your IP reputation so that email providers anti-spam measures know that your emails are trustworthy.

The question is how do you tell these filters that your IP can be trusted not to send spam email?

The answer is to choose a group of contacts you know will engage with your emails as they have done in the past, and start by sending your emails just to this group.

These contacts will be opening and engaging with your emails.

Therefore your IP reputation will begin to build.

Cleansing Your Email List

As mentioned earlier, one of the biggest ways to improve email deliverability is to cleanse your email list.

If you do this regularly, you should see a strong improvement in not only your email deliverability but in your email marketing results.

Here are a few ways to cleanse your email list:

1. Hard Bounces – a hard bounce happens when an email address is incorrect or if the email address no longer exists.Regularly cleanse your email list of these hard bounce contacts, so you are not triggering bounces that the main email providers, such as Hotmail and Gmail, keep track of.
2. Soft Bounces – soft bounces happen when a contacts inbox is full or if there is a technical issue such as the server being downYou can cleanse your email list of these soft bounces if a contacts email address bounces three to four times. Soft bounces aren’t as severe as hard bounces, but it is still an excellent idea to remove them from your email list.
3. Dormant Contacts – Did you know that on average almost half of the contacts in an email list are inactive?These dormant contacts can affect your email deliverability so cut them from the list after six to twelve months. Whatever period you choose is entirely up to you.
4. Unsubscribers – If you are using an email service provider for your email marketing, it might already process unsubscribers immediately but make sure to check this.If it does not, make sure you are removing unsubscribers from your email list straight away before sending another email blast out.

Should You Use Double Opt-in?

If you notice that contacts who have recently signed up to your newsletter or created an account and marked your email as spam, it may be a sign that your opt-in process isn’t clear enough.

You can have a double opt-in process where after a user has submitted a contact form, email signup or created an account, an email will be fired off to them asking them to ‘click to confirm’ if they want to subscribe.

This may cut down the amount contacts marking your emails as spam.

Here’s a study conducted by Mailchimp on the open rate comparison of using a double opt-in vs. a single opt-in:

You can see that a double opt-in has a much higher (almost double) unique open rate (sitting at about 28-29%).

You may get fewer opt-ins on the front end but the quality of the lead is higher.

Building Your Sender Score

80% of low email deliverability issues are a primarily caused by a poor sender score.

If this doesn’t kick you into action, we don’t know what will!

A sender score is assigned by Return Path to every outgoing mail server and calculates the number of unsubscribes and spam reports you get. The highest score is 100 so you want to aim for a score of 90 and higher.

Make sure to check regularly your sender score.

Below is an example of a sender score report.

Avoid Sending Too Many Emails

We understand that you want to keep reminding your contacts about your products or services but don’t push it too far that you are sending too many email and ‘pestering’ them.

It has been reported that 73% of contacts opt-out because they get too many emails.

Check You Haven’t Been Blacklisted

You can be blacklisted if you have a high number of people marking your emails as spam.

Regularly check your spam reports and check the blacklists so you can do something about it if you have in fact been blacklisted.

Consistency with Email Scheduling

You may be surprised to hear that having a consistent schedule for your emails will help to improve your email deliverability.

You could send a ‘This Weeks Highlights’ on a Friday or a ‘Today We Are Loving’ each day.

Erratic emails can cause sending spikes which have a negative effect on your sender reputation.

Consistency with Sender Name and Email Address

Be consistent with your sender name and email address just as with your email scheduling.

Your contacts will know that it is you, who is sending the email and will be happier to open the email.

This will in turn send positive signals for your sender reputation.

Don’t Get Caught in a Spam Trap

A spam trap is when and email address has been taken over by an anti-spam organization.

If you have one of these email addresses on your email list and you send an email to it, your email delivery rates could drop by a massive 38%.

Crazy right?

Ask Contacts to Add You to Their Address Book

Not many contacts will do this, but there is certainly no harm in asking.

Add a message to each of your emails to prompt the contact to add your email address to their safe senders list so that your emails will never go in their junk folder… even if an email has characteristics of spam.

Vet Competition Entry Contacts

If you are using competitions to build your email list, be very careful when vetting these email addresses as almost 49% of email accounts have been created for emails that people don’t intend on opening.

Add Unsubscribe Links

It is by law that you have to add an unsubscribe link to your marketing emails.

Many marketers place their unsubscribe links at the bottom of the email however it is important that you make things easy for the contact and so perhaps consider placing the link at the top as Pizza Express has.

So What Now?

You can create the best email marketing campaign the world has ever seen, but if your emails aren’t being delivered then it’s a complete waste of your time.

As well as concentrating on building and optimising your marketing emails, it is equally important to regularly cleanse your email list and build up your sender score.

Let us know in the comments below, what type of open rate do you see from your email list at the moment?