Email Deliverability: Are Your Marketing Efforts Being Wasted?

Effective email marketing is a delicate tightrope walk — done well, your customers engage with your business, but one misstep and you can lose them to the dark abyss forever. That may sound a tad dramatic, but the truth is email deliverability is incredibly important for your marketing efforts. For example, too many spam reports prevent you from getting to as many people, and spammy subject lines cause high unsubscribe rates. 

Email deliverability is essentially the thing that makes or breaks your email campaign. So, how do you gracefully and delicately walk this tightrope while still moving the needle for your company? Read on to find out what you need to know about email deliverability and your marketing. 

Understanding Email Delivery vs. Email Deliverability

First, it’s important to differentiate email deliverability from delivery. Although the terms are often used interchangeably, they have different meanings. 

Email delivery is when an email is delivered to the server, while deliverability is when the email successfully arrives in the recipient’s intended mailbox. You can have good delivery but bad deliverability if the email didn’t make its way into the subscriber’s inbox but instead ended up in their spam folder. 

Analyzing email bounce, open, unsubscribe, and click-through rates, as well as spam complaints, helps marketers understand how people respond and engage with their campaigns. Tracking these data points allows marketers to detect trends and make adjustments as needed. 

Why Email Deliverability Matters in Marketing 

Who wants to spend a ton of time, money, and effort throwing an amazing dinner party if no one shows up? Similarly, the work spent crafting the perfect message and personalizing the content for the intended audience means nothing if the email never makes it into your target’s mailbox. You can help achieve this goal by ensuring deliverability, consisting of these 3 components.

• Identification is used to validate who you are through protocols such as Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC).
• Reputation refers to a score given to you by an organization and internet service provider (ISP) regarding your trustworthiness as an email sender.
• Content refers to how well you provide recipients with relevant and appropriate content. 

Successful Email Campaigns Depend on Deliverability. 

According to HubSpot, email marketing boasts a whopping $42 for every $1 spent, translating to a staggering 4,200% ROI. This statistic confirms that, when used strategically, email marketing is a vitally important part of your efforts to build and maintain your brand. 

Your Competitors are Sending Emails Too.

An estimated 4.1 billion people use email worldwide. As the number of email users has increased, so have the number of emails that don’t pass email providers’ filtering technology tests and end up blocked. 

The email marketing space is a very competitive one as senders vie against each other for email providers to accept their emails and filter them into inboxes. With these tough parameters and competition, marketers must ensure they send the right content to the right audience at the right time, nurturing the relationship with their subscribers adeptly and knowledgeably. 

How to Improve Your Email Deliverability

Now that we know how important email deliverability is to your marketing efforts, how can you improve what you’re doing to ensure your efforts aren’t in vain?

A Clean List

First, you have to keep a clean email subscriber list. Permissions expire, and inactive subscribers skew your engagement metrics. Keep a close watch on your list and remove inactive people or automate a re-confirmation campaign. 

Deliverability issues can result from spam traps, email addresses that look real but are used to detect spammers. If there’s one on your list, it can make it seem like you engage in spammy email address acquisition, such as buying or scraping email lists off the internet. 

A New Perspective

Sending emails that don’t consider the recipient’s point of view is like a circle — pointless. Here are some of the best ways to ensure your reader actually engages with the content you’ve sent over your competitors’. 

Consider Your Content

Make your content relevant to the recipient by using personal language and engaging text, starting with your subject line. If that’s not entertaining or enticing enough, your email doesn’t really stand a chance of being opened in the first place. Then, in the email body, talk to your subscribers in a warm, human way so they don’t feel like they’re being talked at by a robot. 

Consider Your Frequency

Too much of a good thing…is a bad thing. Let your subscribers choose their own email preferences, so you can keep them intrigued without overwhelming them. Even better, let them choose areas of interest, so they stay even better engaged. 

An Easy Out

How many times have you opened an email and couldn’t figure out why you were getting it? It wasn’t relevant to you, and you didn’t remember signing up for it. This is a huge email marketing mistake. Emails sent to uninterested parties lead to decreased open rates and increased unsubscribe rates and spam complaints. 

Pay attention to the longevity of your subscribers. Nurture the new folks while also keeping content captivating for long-timers. If someone on your email subscription list hasn’t engaged in a while, have processes in place to check in with them and give them the option to opt-out of future emails. If you ignore this subscriber group, it can negatively affect your reputation and your ability to get emails into the boxes of your active subscribers. 

PHOS Marketing Emails Deliver

The bottom line is email marketing isn’t going anywhere. Ensure your marketing emails don’t go into the recipient’s trash folder by following our tips for optimized deliverability. Monitor your subscriber lists regularly and pivot when needed to maximize conversions and minimize complaints. 

When you need help creating meaningful content and getting it into the hands of your intended audience, reach out to the PHOS team. We’re always ready to help you make the most of your email marketing campaigns.