Ways To Improve Your Email Deliverability
Email deliverability is one of the most important factors to any Email marketers. As an email marketer you’ll want your emails to be delivered all the time every time. But of course, that is just what every mailing marketers hope for because, in reality, many factors decide whether or not your emails and offers actually get delivered to your subscribers or not.
If you are unlucky and your emails lands into the spam folder most of the time, then you need to seriously take effort to fix this problem. The reliability of email messaging has gone down over the years due to spam activities and spam filters that are set up by your email providers or even your internet service providers.
Hence in order to ensure that you get the best delivery rate of your mailings it is important for every marketer to observe these factors below.
A ‘Clean’ list
Many list marketers do not know this but your list needs to be ‘cleaned’ every now and then. By managing your list and deleting ‘unresponsive’ emails contacts and email addresses that bounces often, you are taking precautions not to let your internet service providers (ISP) from marking you with a bad score and hence block your emails from getting delivered.
A general rule of thumb is to clear emails that bounce 2 to 3 times in a period of 30 days. So email marketers, it’s time to get to work and start maintaining your list to keep it clean and responsive for best deliverability rate.
Your message format
Most autoresponders will allow you to deliver your emails in two formats which is the HTML version or the plain text version. It is important to keep in mind that most spams uses HTML format and that it is very hard for ISPs and other 3rd party filters to differentiate if your email is spam or not when using HTML format.
Hence a good way is to use both the HTML and text format for your emails just in case your HTML formatted email get filtered.
Be careful with bad URLs
Most of the time, we will include a link or URL in our emails when promoting an offer or referring to another site in our emails. However, extreme caution should be taken to ensure that the URL does not have a bad record.
If the URL you are using has a record of spamming or doing ‘unethical’ activities, then more often than not your entire email would get filtered. Now I am sure most marketers would not want this to happen to them. Hence always take the time to do a research on the background of the URL that you will be pasting into your email or the consequences may be bad indeed.
Attachments or not…
It is common for virus mails or spam mails to include an attachment to an email and over the years, the trust level for emails with attachments, especially an email coming from someone whom they are not familiar with is on the record low.
What this means is that even if your email is delivered, but if your readers suspect your email as spam or virus infected, they will automatically delete it or worse… they might even report you which is when you can be sure that bigger headaches will be coming your way.
Hence it is more advisable to actually send your readers to the ‘file’ via a web link to your website instead of using an attachment. This is the best practice these days, and this is what most professionals do to ensure that their readers maintain a certain trust towards them.
Spam Keywords
When crafting your email, you need to choose your words wisely. You see, in order for most spam filters to work, they monitor your email for common words found in spam emails. These words can be anything from pornography, medication, or health pills to anything that is commonly found in spam mails or phishing scams.
If you absolutely must use some of these ‘suspicious’ words, one way for you to include them is to find an alternate word from a thesaurus, or you could add a ‘full stop’ or ‘dash’ or an ‘underscore’ in between the words to make sure that the words do not spell out exactly the same way that will trigger a spam filter.
Get permission…
A lot of marketers' email delivery rate gets hampered when readers get confused when they receive your email and forgot that they actually subscribed to your email newsletter previously. When this happens, these readers are only a click away from reporting your email as spam and this could hurt your reputation in the eyes of your ISP, your autoresponders or common email services along with their spam filters.
A great way to remind your readers why they are receiving your emails is to insert a line of reminder that tells them when, where and why they opted-in to your newsletter in the first place. This is important to prevent them from feeling at loss or getting the feeling that they have no idea why they are getting your email.
A responsible marketer should always use a confirmation email to get the permission from a reader in order to send those emails periodically. Confirmed emails are more likely to get delivered and read most of the time, and if you did your part right you would have established some sort of relationship between you and the reader during the confirmation email as well.
Unsubscribe easily
The fact of the matter is this… there will always be people who will unsubscribe from your emails from time to time and there’s really no way for you to stop this.
You could reduce the number of unsubscribes using very quality contents and ensure that all your contents are relevant to your readers, and still you won’t be able to stop people from unsubscribing.
Hence what you should do is to provide your readers an easy way out.
Whatever the reason it might be, give them a way to opt out. This way, you can stop unhappy subscribers from reporting you. In fact, you would not want these people to be in your list anyway because somewhere along the line they’ve already lost their trust to you and it will take a lot of effort and money to earn back their trust.
If you know for a fact they these people are unsubscribing from your list due to the reason of getting too much emails (and not because they dislike your contents), a good way to retain these people is to put a little note on your unsubscribe page and ask them if they would like to be automatically transferred to a list which you will mail them ‘less’.
This way you might be able to keep some of these subscribers who are still in trust of you but wants out because they are getting overwhelmed with too many emails a day.
With that said, every email marketer should be responsible for their own list and if they take the effort to build a good relationship and take note of the factors above, then they will certainly be able to enjoy the best achievable deliverability rate from here onwards.
