Home » General » 8 Email Deliverability Best Practices

8 Email Deliverability Best Practices

Email marketing can be an effective solution to increase revenues and traffic to a website, but it has to be performed correctly in order to be effective. Just sending out lots of emails every day to your list isn’t going to attract a lot of value to your brand. You’ve got to work smarter instead of harder and these email deliverability best practices are going to help you make that happen today.

1. Give Your Email List a Reason to Trust You

This is the most important concept in the email deliverability best practices. You need to give every subscriber a reason to be able to trust you and your emails. You can do this by taking the time to set clear expectations about what you are going to be sending them. This is setting up what is called “perceived value.” Your perceived value is a promise that you are making, sometimes unspoken, about what you will deliver. You must then be able to deliver on that value with every email to maintain your subscriber base.

2. Be Responsible About How You Are Building Subscriber Lists

If you’re not confirming or verifying all new email addresses as you are building your lists, then you could be wasting a lot of time and effort for nothing. You need to go through your subscriber lists and scrub out all of the inactive emails or non-responsive ones on a regular basis as well so that you are focusing your energy on those that are interested in what you have to market.

3. Go Beyond the Basics

There are a lot of cheap email marketing platforms that are available today, but the entry-level platforms don’t usually provide you with the data you need for true success. You need to have a platform that is able to handle the feedback loops which develop, bounce codes that come back, and be able to optimize your connections. Some of the hottest platforms today are the ones that can target the specific habits of each consumer and deliver emails at a time when they are most likely to open them up to be exposed to your materials.

4. Know When Your Target Audience is Typically Online

If you are targeting a demographic that usually works from 9-5, then you should know that the best time isn’t to send an email for when they get home at 6pm or later. They’re exhausted by then and will likely delete any emails that aren’t personal in nature. If you target their lunch break, between 12:30pm-2pm, then you have a much better chance of having your emails opened, read, and maybe even acted upon. Keep time zones in mind when you’re sending out these emails as well. A 2pm email in Pacific Time is 5pm in Eastern Time and that’s often too late to make a difference.

5. Content Always Matters When It Comes To Email Deliverability

The quality of your content is the difference between a good ROI and a terrible one. Although bad content isn’t necessarily going to prevent your email from being delivered, people won’t open or engage with bad content very often. What’s worse is this: a poorly constructed email gets marked as spam, even when a customer has given permission for your emails to be received into their inbox. Good email content is generally about 250 words or less and it is formatted in a way that is easy to read. Before sending out an email, make sure to preview it so that you’ll know what it looks like if a subscriber decided to open it up.

6. You Can’t Ignore Complaints About Your Emails

Many marketers just tend to shrug off messages from their email delivering platform when complaints are filed. Who cares about a complaint, right? They won’t become a customer, so the focus stays on those that are opening emails and reading them. The only problem is that anti-spam organizations take complaints in this area very seriously and getting blacklisted by them can shut down your business faster than a light switch turns off a light. Open up an email address specifically for complaints, make sure that people can openly contact you, and consider registering with an anti-spam group so that you can establish a positive reputation against bad email practices.

7. Set Comprehensive Measurements That Really Work

Metrics are only as good as what they measure. If you want to know how good your email deliverability happens to be, then you need to work on having a solid email reputation score – often called a Sender Score. A better ranking will give you better inbox placement rate against the natural spam filters that are in place on almost all email accounts these day. This is another reason why complaints need to be taken seriously. They affect your Sender Score, as does the amount of emails you send out regularly, the amount of rejected emails that come your way, and even the number of unknown users.

8. Above Everything Else, Be Transparent in Everything That You Do

If you are going to establish trust through the use of these email deliverability best practices, then it is important that you are always transparent in what you choose to do. Think about publishing your complaint rates, even if they might be somewhat poor, so you can publicly outline measures that you are taking to improve the subscriber experience. Bounce rates, your IP Sender Score, and whatever data you have available that proves you’re a stand-up business, when published, will help you as well.

By knowing these email deliverability best practices, you’ll be able to work toward a better open rate than the 15%-20% industry average and 2% conversion rate. Incorporate them into your next campaign and your subscribers will thank you for it, even if your efforts don’t always result in a direct sale. A good first impression is a unique thing – it might result in a future sale, even if it seems like your first emails are ignored.

Email Deliverability Facts and Stats

About The Author
Although millions of people visit Brandon's blog each month, his path to success was not easy. Go here to read his incredible story, "From Disabled and $500k in Debt to a Pro Blogger with 5 Million Monthly Visitors." If you want to send Brandon a quick message, then visit his contact page here.