Email Deliverability – 5 Ways For Building Strong Sender Reputation!

Email marketing still remains the top factor of getting online conversions, with average ROI of approx. $40 USD for every dollar spent. These email are important part of each brand’s multi-channel strategy along with building a customer journey that can scale in a personalized way across your client’s buyer persona. However, clients can surpass the technical side of their email strategy to focus on palpable elements like designing. While they begin to look for bounce rates or the reason for slow emails deliverability.

The primitive reason for good deliverability is ensuring each step in your client’s strategy gets optimized for engagement from starting. In easy words, good email engagement is defining factor of high email deliverability.

In this post, we’ll discuss the elemental steps one can take to improve your client’s email deliverability. Also we’ll uncover what deliverability means and which factor does internet service providers (ISPs) consider for determining inbox placement. Here are 5 specific tactics one can implement now to boost your client’s email deliverability rates.

What is email deliverability and how to improve it?

Let’s start the learning by a quick refresher on what deliverability actually means the ability to deliver emails to subscriber’s inboxes and good deliverability can only be achieved by a strong sender reputation. Since user engagement with emails is more important than ever and it’s key factor in deliverability—and your success. Internet service providers like Outlook and Gmail emphasize at sending frequency and subscriber engagement to decide whether e-mail should be placed in the inbox or spam folder. The senders reputation is mainly focused on the score ISPs give, indicating whether subscribers prefer receiving your client’s emails. They also look for email opening ratio and click rates, and based on these engagement ratio, decide whether your emails can continue getting into the inbox folder. ISP’s considers a trusted and ideal sender on the basis of consistent e-mail volume with high engagement, on a frequent basis. Now have a look into methodology to help clients building a strong sender reputations, place in crowded inboxes, and improve deliverability long term.

1. Set up an email subdomain

Subdomains are important for achieving long term email deliverability. They helps in separating your reputation for different types of emails (i.e. marketing v/s transactional).

What is a subdomain? 

A subdomain is a part of main domain indicating a subsection. In the below mentioned example, subdomain is “mail.”  You can place anything preferable in front of @ symbol, whether it’s your name, or your favorite food. This part doesn’t matter to ISPs.

Why are subdomains necessary for good deliverability? 

These subdomains provide facility of separating various email types (i.e. marketing and transactional emails) from parental domain. This also ensures that marketing mistakes don’t turmoil the main domain reputation. Splitting of marketing and transactional emails into separate subdomains, let you ensure that client transactional emails (receipts and order confirmation) always go to inboxes. In easy words, sending marketing emails on same subdomain just like transactional emails make sure that deliverability of your transactional emails will decrease, since the rate of opening for marketing emails is avg. 20 – 30 percent, while transactional emails are having an avg. 80-90 percent open rates.

2. Ensure having a clean list

Since internet service providers prefer senders with continuous “good” emails receive higher engagement. One can possibly damage deliverability by continuing to email subscribers who never engage. Building a clean list will reduce the chances of emailing subscribers who can badly affect their reputation. It’s advised to remove inactive subscribers so clients can go ahead with best possible ways to re-connect with them. It’s also recommended to maintain the hygiene of lists by constant elimination of invalid subscribers since these are never to be mailed kind of people for prospect clients. A good email service provider (ESP) will often have this ability built into their product.

3. Utilize segmentation for sending targeted emails

One of the most effective thumb rule for email marketing is never sending email to the whole list. The days of blasting entire marketing lists are long gone as because it was ruining deliverability. Rather, clients must prefer an email segmentation strategy that’s solely based on buyer personas in language specific methodology, and this is most likely to get them to converted. Targeted emails have shown 82% success rates than bulk email blasts, further proving that segmentation is a good email strategy.

Segment by engagement levels

Addition to above mentioned strategy is segmenting subscribers according to engagement levels: active vs. droppers of last few email sends. This might appear to be slightly different for every clients, as its dependent on frequency of sends. We automatically fragment contacts into engagement levels on the basis of real-time updates: actives, new subscribers, at-risk, inactive, and invalids.

Segment by demographics, interests, purchase behavior

While segregating email lists according to active (engaged) subscribers, prefer segmenting on the basis of interests, demographics, and purchase behaviors also. The chances of active subscribers finding same email relevant is close to null, so doing segmentation on interests before engagement level will guarantee higher engagement.

4. Leverage email automations

The automation of email campaigns is easiest method for sending hyper-targeted emails. Every email strategy should consider a welcome and win-back automation set up, because this is the sure-shot method of boosting email engagement. Also it’s the first interaction a new subscriber will do with the brand, and it’s the primary thing for ISPs to rank a sender reputation and boost deliverability. Almost 74 percent of consumers like to have a welcome email when they subscribe and you don’t wish to miss this piece of your email strategy.

5. Manage sending volume over time

Always know that ISPs keep on grading your sends and engagement, and monitor suspicious activity like erratic spikes in sending volume. For maintain a healthy sender reputation, it’s best to send small chunks a few times a week vs. one large send once a week. Those creating a new subdomain or plan to send emails over a new IP, should warm up and ramp into high sending volumes over time.

A good email strategy… 

A good email strategy lets you gain more clients through healthy long term email deliverability too. From ensuring a clean list, to segmenting subscribers by engagement level, to leveraging welcome and winback automations, these tactics are things you can implement today that will guarantee better inbox placement tomorrow.