Tips for Improving Email Deliverability

Email deliverabilityⓘ is the likelihood or guarantee that your email messages will reach the inbox. A "delivered" email receipt isn't the same as deliverability, as many messages can end up in the spam folder if your email deliverabilityⓘ is poor. The inbox is where your subscribers check most frequently and will provide your company with the highest engagement and conversion rate.

Below, you can find quick tips for improving email deliverabilityⓘ so that your email marketing is worth the investment.

Tip 1 - Use email verification

First and foremost, you need to practice regular email list cleaning. Email verification will identify and eliminate any invalid or high-risk email addresses that are either guaranteed or likely to bounce. You can’t deliver emails if the destination doesn’t exist.

Plus - the higher your email bounce rate is - the worse your email deliverability will be. Internet service providers (ISPs) use email campaign metrics like bounce rate to determine the trustworthiness and reliability of a sender.

If you're regularly bouncing emails at a high rate (more than 2%), you look less like a legitimate company and more like a spammer.

Use an email verification service, at minimum, every three months. Email lists decay on average at roughly 23% annually. Therefore, regularly cleaning your list will combat this gradual decay and keep your email database up to date.

Tip 2 - Use a real-time email verification APIⓘ

While uploading your email list for email validation periodically is essential, a real-time email verifier can further safeguard your email marketing. Here’s how it works.

Email verification companies provide an API, which stands for Application Programming Interface, and allows the email verifier to communicate with another application. This API connection makes it possible for you to begin verifying emails in other key locations, including your websites, landing pages, and other spots where you have email registration or signup forms.

With the real-time email verification API active, it will auto-verify emails entered into your form. If the verifier detects an invalid or other high-risk email type, it will block it. Then, it advises the user to use a valid email address.

In other words, a real-time email verifier stops invalid emails from entering your database in the first place. This technology keeps your email list clean, leading to low email bounce rates, better email engagement, and more conversions.

It can also aid your customers by alerting them to accidental entry issues, such as typos or misspellings with their data. You'll connect with more customers who want email content from your business.

Tip 3 - Use email authenticationⓘ

Email authenticationⓘ is a system or process of providing an email domain with identifying information to prove that the party sending the message is legitimate and authorized.

The most commonly used ways of authenticating emails include:

Each process provides a different way of authenticating an email, including creating a list of allowed domain or IP addresses, as well as adding digital signatures to sent emails. DMARC is then a policy that tells receiving email domains what to do if a sender fails or passes these checks. You may choose to allow, reject, or even quarantine messages from suspicious senders.

Email authentication is not only a free way to protect your emails and sender reputation, it will be a requirement for popular domains like Google and Yahoo.

Take advantage of free email authentication generators to add protection to your email domain for better email deliverability. Plus, you can supervise your domain's email authentication with tools like DMARC monitor and get instant alerts to suspicious email activity.

Tip 4 - Segment your email lists

ISPs also look at engagement metrics like open and click rates, spam complaints, and unsubscribes. The better your emails perform, the better your sender reputation is and the higher your email deliverability will be.

ISPs want to ensure that their users are receiving the email content they want to read.

One of the best ways to improve your email campaign performance is to segment your email lists.

When your email marketing list has tens of thousands of subscribers, it’s unlikely that one email will speak to every person with the same impact. While those contacts willingly subscribed to your list, each person comes from a different walk of life and has different things they’d like to hear from your company.

By segmenting your email lists, you give yourself the opportunity to personalize the content for the reader.

Segment your audience by their stage in the buyer's journey, demographic, products or services used, last purchase date, and any other categories that may be relevant to their experience. The better you're able to meet their specific needs, the better your emails will perform.

Tip 5 - Test and update email content as necessary

Continuing with segmentation, you must continue to test new types of email content and revise based on performance.

If you've followed the previous email deliverabilityⓘ tips, you should have a clean email listⓘ of valid contacts and a few segmented email lists to test. Next, it's time to try some catchy, intriguing subject lines that will attract a higher open rate. Make it clear what's inside (being vague or indirect is annoying), but leave some excitement to be found inside.

The body of the email also needs to be lean and valuable. Though you earned the reader's subscription, they likely receive dozens of emails like yours daily. For the few seconds that you have their attention, you need to ensure your words count by offering something memorable and of value.

Don't settle for just addressing the reader by name - that's the bare minimum. Acknowledge who they are as a customer or professional, call out their specific problem, and provide the solution. A great way to do this is to provide resources and education that benefit them at no cost.

It can take time to find the right formula for your brand's particular email content. Be diligent about testing and measuring results, and make changes in the areas needed.

Finally - you can also take a direct approach by asking your readers what they want to see.

Tip 6 - Monitor your sender reputation

You've cleaned up your database, authenticated your emails, and created great email content. Now, it's time to supervise your domain and sender reputation.

Even with email marketing best practices, there are always factors that can negatively affect your sender reputation and email deliverability. All it takes is one too many spam complaints, emailing a spam trap, or an instance of email fraud to flag your company's email domain.

There are a variety of email monitoring tools online that can assist with monitoring different aspects of your reputation. DMARC monitor, for example, allows you to get notified whenever attackers or imposters are trying to spoof your email domain. The sooner you're aware of suspicious activity, the quicker you can take action to protect yourself.

Likewise, blacklist monitoring is the best way to get notified of any unintentional or accidental email infractions. If you see your domain or IP appear on a blacklist, you can act fast and work with the blacklist service to resolve the issue.

After all, ISPs don't want to stop legitimate companies from reaching customers. The more proactive you are in managing your email domain and reputation, the more likely you are to be awarded with strong email deliverability.

6 tips for improving email deliverabilityⓘ

To summarize quickly, every email sender needs to use the following tips to boost their email deliverabilityⓘ:

So long as you're always striving to deliver great email content and protect your readers, ISPs will award you with strong email deliverability.

For even more in-depth email deliverability tactics, check out the Complete Guide to Email Deliverability.

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