11 Ways to Improve Email Deliverability

What is Email Deliverability?

What is email deliverability and how can I improve it? Glad you asked, 'cause we're here today to answer all your questions! First off, email deliverability refers to the ability of your emails to reach the receiver’s inbox. The opposite of this is when your emails get flagged as spam. Or if they are blocked from the receiver’s inbox by their ISP. And as we all know, no-one reads spam emails.

Why is Email Deliverability Important?

You want to make sure that every single person on your email list receives your emails. Of course, the more people who get your emails, the better your open rates and engagement are going to be. And when all of these markers are on the up-and-up, your bottom line will thank you for it. Ka-ching!

How to Improve Email Deliverability- Email Deliverability Best Practices

The best way to improve email deliverability is to follow fundamental methods that work every time. This means you need to:

Use the same sender name

Always use the same sender name for your emails, whether it’s your company name or personal name. This helps to build familiarity and a sense of continuity, so subscribers will always recognize your emails.

Warm your IP up

To build IP integrity, only send emails to a small list of engaged subscribers. Once Internet Service Providers (ISPs) see that your emails are getting good engagement, they will trust your IP moving forward, thus reducing your chances of getting flagged. Of course, as your email list grows, you’ll need to graduate to a separate IP address. But you can’t just start sending emails like they’re going out of style. If you have a large email list, take it slow and start with about 50, 000 emails twice a month after your transition. If you have a small email list under 25, 000 then you can afford to send more emails than that and you won’t need to warm up your IP address as much. The goal here is to build trust with your IP and avoid being spammy.

Simplify the opt-out process

Don’t make it difficult to break up with you. Being clingy will leave a bad impression and your audience is less likely to interact with your company in the future. Instead, make sure your unsubscribe button is clear and easy to access. It’s also a good idea to have a canceled subscription workflow so you can say goodbye more gracefully in a way that leaves a good impression.

Segment your emails

Email segmentation involves learning who your recipients are and grouping them into specific categories, because the people who are interested in your brand may not all share the same interests. Segmentation allows you to send people personalized emails with content that actually addresses their unique needs. You can separate your emails into different segments based on, 1) location; 2) demographic; 3) past purchasing behavior. Sure, you’ll need to spend more time customizing your emails for each group, but this one hack can significantly improve your engagement rate.

Get rid of tag-alongs

You’ll want to periodically purge your email list of inactive contacts who no longer engage with your emails. You should also weed out inactive email addresses and addresses that were entered incorrectly as they contribute to email deliverability issues.  We've seen clients have to clean up segments of up to 70k contacts because they were made up of totally worthless email addresses.

Consent is cool

Make sure to only send your emails to people who have opted into your email list. That way, they’re more likely to engage with your emails instead of seeing them as an invasion of their privacy and improve email deliverability.

Avoid spammy content

Don’t be cringey, okay? No-one likes cringey content. Avoid anything that screams “spam” in your emails, including writing in all caps, using the red font (scammy sales funnel alert!), and clickbait subject lines.

Instead, create high-quality content that provides value to the reader. This can do wonders for your website’s engagement as well as sales and lead rates.

Be consistent

Manage your audience’s expectations from the beginning. If you promise to send them emails once a week, stick to that promise. Don’t bombard them with more than they signed up for, and don’t pull disappearing acts on them either. 

Don’t send too many emails

One of the quickest ways to annoy your audience is to flood their inboxes. For best results, aim for a reasonable 1 to 4 emails a month. That’s the sweet spot that seems to work well for most brands.

Don’t buy contact lists

This might seem like a convenient solution at first, but trust me, it will cost you in the long run. Nothing beats growing your email list organically, especially if you want to build sustainable relationships with your subscribers and actually get the results that you want out of your email list.

Use marketing software to your advantage

With the right marketing software, you can effortlessly manage a lot of the activities required to help you achieve optimal email deliverability. That’s because email marketing software allows you to automate a lot of the essential tasks mentioned above, such as email workflows and segmentation. 

As with anything, you’ll need to apply yourself and follow through with these techniques if you want to see results. But once you fix these minor problems you should see an improvement in email deliverability rates while preventing any future failures.

What is a Good Email Deliverability Rate

So, let’s say you’ve applied all of the above tips. How can you tell if you’re headed in the right direction? For starters, you should enjoy open rates of 12 to 14%-minimum! You also want to keep spam complaint rates at a low of 0.8-1% and unsubscribe rates low as well. These signs are a good indication of email deliverability and the more you work on your email strategy holistically, the more you can increase that number. 

Improving Email Deliverability

Improving email deliverability should be just as much of a priority as creating a well-thought-out strategy and curating the perfect email creatives.

Need help keeping the balance? CodeCrew is here to help! Not to toot our own horn, but we’re email marketing experts with a lot of experience helping startups to master the email game. So, keep it locked to CodeCrew and learn all the latest email marketing secrets!