5 Email Deliverability Best Practices to Boost Your Inbox Reach

Most marketers focus on their email content before anything else, but deliverability is an equally important metric that has a massive impact on your email marketing success. It’s critical to consistently reevaluate your deliverability practices to identify weaknesses and look for ways to increase your outreach.

This guest post will cover some of the most effective strategies for improving your email deliverability and reaching out to as many contacts as possible. Even a small improvement can help you make substantially more sales. Keep in mind that it takes time to improve your reputation—don’t expect to achieve 100% deliverability overnight.

#1. Understand Deliverability and Reputation

Many marketers don’t understand the importance of email deliverability and their sender reputation, so simply learning more about these factors can help you make progress. In short, your deliverability rate measures the percentage of your emails that make it to the user’s inbox. More than 20 percent of all opt-in emails are filtered out, significantly decreasing your outreach in each campaign.

Deliverability is primarily based on your reputation, which in turn depends on a number of metrics related to your history as an email sender. Some of the most important criteria for sender reputation include the quality of your list, your click-through rate on previous messages, and your overall email frequency. Your goal is to optimize as many of these statistics as possible to make your domain more trustworthy to email filters.

#2. Use IP Warming

Some brands send out a large volume of marketing emails all at once, but this strategy will likely have a negative effect on your reputation and deliverability. If you have more than around 50,000 contacts, you can maximize these metrics by gradually warming up your reputation before sending emails on a larger scale.

IP warming is especially important if your brand is new to email marketing as you haven’t yet had time to improve your reputation organically. Similarly, you should always warm up your IP after switching email marketing services in order to develop your reputation with the new application.

To start IP warming, begin by exporting your most valuable leads—typically new subscribers and those who have clicked through on emails in the last few months—to your new email marketing service. From there, you should run your first campaign with this limited audience before gradually adding more and more contacts for each new campaign.

Look at the example of IP warming when you have a list with 50K+ subscribers.

Now, look at the scheme which shows how you should do IP warmup for the database of 300K subscribers.

Starting with your most engaged leads gives your sender reputation an immediate boost and makes future emails more likely to deliver to your entire list. If you’re moving from another email marketing service, your campaigns will gradually shrink as you begin to target more and more users with the new application.

#3. Avoid Switching IPs

While IP warming can be used to improve the reputation of any new sender, it can also be a long and complicated process, and it often takes time to achieve the same reputation you had before. With that in mind, you should always avoid switching to a new IP whenever possible.

Some marketers assume that sending emails from a new IP will allow them to reset a bad reputation, but simply using a different IP address won’t fix the problems with your email marketing strategies. It’s almost always more effective to adjust your strategies while using your current IP than to switch to a new address.

#4. Segment Your Content

Audience engagement is one of the most important metrics for sender reputation, so improving your performance on statistics like open rate and click-through rate will help you deliver more emails. It’s extremely difficult to provide relevant and interesting content if you’re sending the same messages to everyone on your email list.

Audience segmentation tools allow you to target specific groups using a variety of customer data points. Everything from age and gender to income and purchase history can be leveraged for audience segmentation, so it’s critical to collect as much audience information as possible. You can gather audience data using a number of marketing automation services.

Segmenting your audience provides several new opportunities for email marketers. Welcome emails, for example, can be triggered whenever a user signs up for your email newsletter. A strong welcome sequence introduces new leads to your brand and starts the customer relationship on a positive note.

Cart abandonment workflows are another popular segmentation option. The majority of online shopping carts are abandoned before the purchase, so converting even a relatively small percentage of abandoned carts could significantly increase your sales. You can start experimenting with more sophisticated workflows after trying these two basic tactics.

#5. Adjust Your Email Frequency

Email frequency is critical for a good sender reputation, yet many marketers send too many emails or send messages at an inconsistent frequency. Optimizing your frequency is an easy way to improve the customer experience and increase your reputation as a sender.

In general, you’ll achieve better results by sending emails at a consistent rate, whether that’s only once a week or twice per month. Try not to send more than roughly two emails per week to avoid being flagged by your subscribers’ email filters.

If you’re having trouble with email frequency, consider giving customers the option to select a frequency based on their own preferences. This strategy makes it easy to send the right number of emails to each subscriber and avoid losing their interest in your content.

Alternatively, you can allow subscribers to select the individual types of content they’re interested in rather than sending the same updates to every user. They’ll have even more control over the emails they receive, leading to better performance on every email marketing metric.

Bottom Line

Email deliverability is one of the most commonly overlooked metrics in digital marketing, and these simple tips can help you improve your reputation quickly for increased deliverability. Remember that you’ll need to go through the IP warming process anytime you switch to a new email marketing service.