Have you ever created a powerful email, clicked send, and then… only to hear silence?
The year 2021 saw an average inbox placement rate of 85%, indicating that 1 out of every 6 emails fails to reach subscribers’ inboxes. Instead, they are redirected to the Gmail promotions folder, or even worse, labeled as SPAM.
The primary concern for email marketers is often centered around metrics such as open rates and clicks. However, these figures hold significance only when your emails are successfully delivered to the recipients’ inboxes.
Moreover, in February 2024, Google and Yahoo implemented new email sending guidelines that if not followed correctly, could ruin your email sender score and overall deliverability.
In order to gain a true understanding of your email metrics, one must have a thorough understanding of deliverability, which should not be mistaken for delivery. Read on to discover ways to improve your email deliverability and ensure messages reach the inbox in 2024.
The concept of email deliverability explained
The sender’s reputation plays a crucial role in their ability to successfully reach the recipient’s inbox, also known as deliverability.
Even if your offer is great and your subject line is enticing, if your emails are not delivered to the inbox, your subscribers will not be able to interact with it.
This situation resembles wasting revenue by flushing it down the toilet.
In today’s marketing landscape, open rates and clicks are no longer considered as valuable metrics. This poses a challenge for email marketers, but what can be done to overcome this issue?
In order to obtain the most precise perspective on deliverability, it is important for senders to keep track of their inbox placement rate. This rate measures the proportion of emails that successfully reach the inbox, compared to those that are marked as spam, denied, or entirely blocked.
The concept of Delivery is not equivalent to Deliverability.
The concept of delivery should not be confused with deliverability. Many senders use the delivered rate, given by their email service provider (ESP), as a way to evaluate deliverability. However, the term “delivered” can be deceptive. The delivered rate only indicates the proportion of emails that were either accepted or rejected by a mailbox provider (such as Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook). It does not reveal whether the messages were delivered to the inbox, marked as spam, or lost in transit.
Uncool, isn’t it?
Although senders may experience a high success rate in delivering their emails, there is still a risk of their emails being consistently flagged as spam. While everything may seem fine at first glance, the sender’s reputation and ability to deliver emails are gradually decreasing.
Factors that Impact Email Deliverability
Ensuring deliverability is crucial. If you are experiencing difficulties with your emails not being delivered to inboxes consistently, it is important to examine these common problems…
- Sender Reputation Issues – The success of your email delivery, whether it ends up in the inbox or spam folder, largely depends on your sender reputation. This includes various factors such as your sending frequency, bounce rates, spam complaints, and hits on spam traps. You can check your sender score on senderscore.org http://senderscore.org/.
- IP or Domain Reputation Problems – Every device connected to the internet, including your email sending servers, has a unique set of numbers called an IP address. This IP address can be either dedicated or shared. Most email marketing companies use shared IP addresses, which means the reputation of other senders on the same IP can impact your deliverability. Domain reputation is also crucial, as spammers often change their IP addresses to avoid detection.
- Blocklists – These are lists of known spammers or senders engaging in spam-like behavior. You can use a Blocklist Lookup Service https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx to ensure that you are not blacklisted.
- Maintaining a Clean Email List – Internet Service Providers (ISPs) prefer clean email lists, so it is crucial to regularly clean your list. This can be done by removing unsubscribes, unknown users, hard bounces, recycled spam traps, and pristine spam traps.
Email Message
If emails that are sent to subscribers are not valuable or interesting, it is likely that they will choose to unsubscribe or mark the emails as spam. This can have a negative impact on the MBP, potentially leading to a decrease in inbox placement.
In order to maintain high levels of email engagement, it is important to personalize emails, segment email lists, refrain from sending blast emails, and avoid using link shorteners, spammy language, or excessive capitalization.
10 Ways to Improve Email Deliverability
Implement these 10 proactive measures to effectively improve email deliverability.
- Verify Authentication Records – Verify you have all your required email authentication records setup for every domain from which you send email. DMARC, DKIM and SPF records are required. A BIMI record is an extra bonus for domain verification. Use https://mxtoolbox.com/MXLookup.aspx to verify your records are configured correctly.
- One-Click Unsubscribe – Verify that all your emails have a one-click unsubscribe link displayed. Make sure email addresses are removed from your lists within 2 days of unsubscribing and maintain a global blocklist so you don’t accidentally email an unsubscribed email address from another list or platform. All major bulk email providers (i.e. ActiveCampaign, Hubspot, MailChimp, Constant Contact, etc.) automatically add unsubscribe links to all your outgoing emails.
- Enable Double Opt-in – A double opt-in is that email that you get, once you provide your email to a business asking you to confirm that you want to be added to their list and receive emails. This is a big green flag for Google so that you can start sending that email address marketing emails. You can typically activate this feature within the settings of your email marketing software.
- Use Email Warmup – This is when you connect to your mailbox to a massive network of mailboxes that exchange emails with one another. The goal of this network is to send positive signals to Google that your sending account is verified and not a spammer. Each email that is sent is marked as important, and 30% of them even replied to. If a warming email does go to spam, the receiving inbox is going to remove it from spam and mark it as important. Some of the warming tools have gotten so advanced that Google cannot tell the difference between a real person interacting with the email and the warming tool. This is important because you are changing the 0.3% spam equation with warming. Let’s say we send a thousand regular marketing emails and now we’re also sending a thousand warming emails. In this scenario, instead of only 3 emails per 1,000 marked as spam gets us into trouble, now it’s 6 out of every 1,000 before our domain will be blacklisted. This may not seem like a lot but the impact on deliverability is massive. You can start warming up your email accounts with tools like warmy.io.
- Use Secondary Email Domains – Use a secondary email domain for newsletters and cold email outreach. You can register additional domains, similar to your primary domain, strictly for sending bulk or cold emails. You would then ensure your authentication records, one click unsubscribe, and double opt-in on that domain and begin warming it up. This in turn protects your primary domain from landing on a blacklist. Consider for a moment the impact on your business if all your emails between your employees and current clients started going to spam. That could have catastrophic impact on your business, essentially cutting off your primary form of communication.
- Segment Your Lists – List segmentation is when you split up your email list into more personalized, smaller, more targeted lists. This could be done by gender, this can be done by interest, this can be done by location, this can be done by age. Whatever data points that you have on your contacts, use it so that you can segment them and send them relevant personalized content. When you send more relevant and personalized emails to your lists, you are less likely to be marked as spam.
- Maintain Good List Hygiene – You need to keep your email lists clean. Use a tool like Everclean to go through your email list and remove all bounced or risky emails at least once per week. If you don’t do this, you’ll end up sending emails that bounce and you’re going to be at high risk of getting your domain blacklisted. In addition, keep your universal blocklist current on all your sending platforms and consider implementing engagement tagging to automatically try to re-engage and then ultimately unsubscribe contacts that have been in active for an extended period of time.
- Maintain Good Email Frequency – How do you maintain good email frequency? Imagine you’re surfing on the web and you see a popup to download an e-book that looks interesting. You give them your email and they send you an email with the e-book, but you don’t ever read it. Now, eight months later, this company emails you out of the blue trying to sell you on some new course or service. What are the chances that you press that spam button? My guess is pretty high. Maintaining a good email frequency means that you’re actively emailing your list with interesting and valuable content so that they know who you are and they expect emails from you. Not emailing them too much as to cause them to unsubscribe or mark you as spam, but just enough to keep you top-of-mind.
- Verify Cold Email Lists – Before starting a cold email campaign you should verify your list with tools like MillionVerifier, Zerobounce, or Reoon. These tools will remove invalid emails, spam traps, inactive email addresses and role-based or shared meial addresses (like info@ or sales@). This will improve your email deliverability by only sending to verified and valid email addresses with reduced bounces.
- Do Not Send Promotions in Cold Email – Instead, focus on providing value upfront, with high quality lead magnets and content. Recipients are much less likely to mark your emails as spam if you are providing value to them instead of jumping straight into a sales pitch.
Say Goodbye to Your Email Deliverability Issues in 2024.
In the years between 2019 and 2021, there was a significant increase of 82% in the global email volume, with credit to the impact of Covid. This trend suggests that the rise in email volume and focus on privacy practices will continue. By implementing the suggestions outlined in this article, you can help improve your email deliverability, ensuring your emails hit the inbox not just get delivered to an ESP.
In today’s world, it is highly advantageous to have an email marketing manager who is proficient in ensuring successful delivery of emails to recipients’ inboxes.
Funnelbug specializes in email marketing and cold email outreach. Book a call with us to learn how we can help you improve your email deliverability.