Do’s and Don’ts of Email Deliverability

Whether we like to admit it or not, we’re all guilty of sending out an email campaign to a list with questionable deliverability. There is no question of how beneficial email marketing is for selling your product, connecting with your users, and generating new leads. But, before we can enjoy all these perks, it is important to ensure your emails are seen.

What is email deliverability?

Email deliverability is exactly what it sounds like: the ability of your emails to land successfully in subscribers’ inboxes. This is an essential component of any successful email marketing campaign because your recipients have to first view your email to engage with it. To improve your email deliverability and get more engagement from your email marketing campaigns, follow the best practices outlined below.

Don’t:

1. Purchase email lists

It can be tempting to purchase a list of email addresses, especially when trying to expand your audience and strengthen your email campaigns. Purchased email lists are filled to the brim with undeliverable email addresses that will result in high bounce rates and damage your sender reputation (more on that later). It is important to grow your email lists organically, which can be done easily by placing an email capture form on your website. A small, but real, engaging email list is far more valuable than a large, unresponsive one. Size doesn’t always matter.

2. Send from a free domain

When choosing which address to send “From” through your ESP, steer clear of using your gmail.com or yahoo.com (or any free email provider) address. These addresses are great for personal emails, but not so much when it comes to large email marketing campaigns. Since anyone can sign up for a free email address, using your free email can cause you to be filtered out of the inbox, as many spammers send through these domains. If you currently have your free domain connected to your campaigns, it’s time to purchase and set up a custom domain and a professional email address. You can often do this through your website host.

Do:

1. Clean your list

Verifying your email list with a reliable email verification solution can be the difference between the inbox (yay) and the spam folder (nay). Email verification weeds out the undeliverable and risky email addresses from your list, which can help reduce your bounce rate and secure your inbox placement. It is essential that you continue to verify your list every few months to discard any emails that have gone bad since the last verification. Sending your email marketing campaigns to undeliverable email addresses is a one-way ticket to the junk folder.

2. Mind your sender reputation

Essentially, your sender reputation is how trustworthy a mailbox provider believes your emails to be. If a large number of your emails are marked as spam by your recipients, or if you are sending to undeliverable email addresses, your sender reputation could be in jeopardy. And if you have a compromised sender reputation, your chances of landing in the inbox are much lower.

All things considered

While composing creative messages, crafting clever subject lines, and perfectly timing your email marketing campaigns are all beneficial, these efforts are useless if your emails are not seen. Following the email deliverability best practices outlined above will help secure your inbox placement, improve your sender reputation, and generate more successful email marketing campaigns overall. If you liked this blog post and are itching for more email marketing tips, please subscribe below.