What do you usually think when the subject of Email Marketing is brought up? What do you think of your Email Reputation? How about your Email Deliverability Rates? Your Bounce Rates? Or perhaps your Conversion Rate?
We associate email marketing with many things, but one of the highlights of this subject is email deliverability. No matter how compelling your subject line is or how informative the email copy is, no one’s going to read it if it lands in the dreadful spam folder.
Come on! Nobody’s reading emails that are already in the Spam Folder.
The Inbox, on the other hand, is another story. According to Opt-In Monster, promotional emails have an 18% open rate and a 3.7% engagement rate, while social media has 0.07%. This implies that email marketing is surely ahead of the game.
This is exactly why you should consider email marketing in your business strategy. Statistics from the same source say that 77% of people prefer to use their email for permission-based promotional messages.
Email Marketing in Singapore
Statistics from Digital Influence Lab states that most Singaporean Citizens use the internet to conduct their research before they buy a product or service offline. What does it have to do with Email Marketing? You see, if people are conducting their research with the intention to buy, they could become your lead. If they see your website and think you have what they’re looking for, plus the relevant content you have, they will most likely subscribe to your newsletters.
Think about it. This person may become your customer. So if you have good email deliverability, you can guide the person down the funnel.
What is Email Deliverability?
It’s the ability to deliver your emails to your subscriber’s inbox. It pre-determines your placement in your recipient’s inbox.
It is essential for an email marketer to know his or her rate when it comes to delivering emails. Whether or not you’ll be sent to the Spam Folder or in the inbox. If your email doesn’t get opened that much, you might want to improve your email deliverability first.
What Causes Low Email Deliverability?
- Your Sender’s Reputation is Low
Sender Reputation determines your trustworthiness. If your reputation is low, your email will most likely be blocked by the mailing clients or find its way to the spam folders. One factor that affects your sender’s reputation is spam complaints. The more complaints you get, the lower your reputation gets. Your open rate and email bounce rate also affect your reputation.
We have further discussed the factors that damage your sender’s reputation here.
- Poor Mailing List Hygiene
You may find this reason in almost every guide out there, but that is because it is really that relevant. Although a lot of us see this job pretty unlikeable, it is essential to keep a clean mailing list. You want to make sure the contacts on your list are active. I highly recommend that you do an email segmentation on your mailing list. Pick out the inactive ones, put them in a separate list.
- You Got Caught in a Spam Trap
Everyone in the email marketing industry knows that picking up contacts from another website is illegal. The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 discussed this. Although this act has been up and running, you still did it. Mailing Clients are blocking you out now.
Mailing Clients intentionally plant trap emails on websites. If you send your mail to a trap email, your IP Address will be flagged as a spammer. You can no longer send emails to your subscribers. This is a sure way to ruin your email deliverability.
- No Email Authentication
Mailing Clients confirm your identity through Email Authentication. If you are not authenticated, the Mailing Clients may not allow your messages to pass through. Or they might put up additional filters to decide whether or not your email should be delivered.
Fortunately, you can still increase your deliverability rates.
How?
1. Control Your Bounce
If you’re not familiar with this, this bounce refers to bounce mail. From the name itself, it means the email you sent was not able to reach your recipient, so it is sent back to you.
There are 2 kinds of bounces, the soft bounce and the hard bounce.
- Soft Bounce
Is a temporary failure. Mails like this bounced because the mailing client’s server failed or the inbox was already full. Because this bounce is only temporary, your email will be delivered if the failure is fixed.
However, you should still monitor soft bounces. If your email bounced more than 10 times, we highly recommend that you separate the email and investigate what’s behind the bounce. You don’t want this to affect your email deliverability.
Soft Bounce Management: The soft bounce threshold should be low. It is usually set to 10.
- Hard Bounce
A permanent failure is usually caused by a non-existent, blocked, or invalid email address. You should be careful of bounces, which Internet Service Providers (ISPs) take seriously because they indicate your mailing list hygiene.
A hard bounce could also mean you just sent an email straight to the spam trap. Not this could injure your email deliverability severely because this could get you blacklisted.
Hard Bounce Management: Retire the email that got a hard bounce. Although some Email Service Providers do this automatically for you, there are some who don’t.
2. Never Buy a Mailing List
You’re just starting out, and you want to give yourself a little boost on your campaigns, so you bought a mailing list. Please do yourself a favor and don’t do this. For the love of email marketing, do not do it. Purchasing a list is nothing but buying trouble.
Here’s a short list of what problems it may give:
- Spam Complaints
If your recipients do not remember signing up for your newsletters, they might report you as spam.
- Bad Quality Contacts
You don’t even know where the emails are from. You just bought them for a good price. You don’t know if they have been cleaned up or if they have a spam trap.
- Trigger Spam Filters
ISPs set up filters, and if they notice the number of spam complaints you get, your mail could be blocked, bounced back, or land in the spam folder.
- Poor Metrics
If people don’t even remember subscribing to you, the recipient may not open your email. If your open rate is low, your email deliverability might be affected.
A small mailing list, which you honestly got, is better because the subscriber signed up for it. And because they signed up for it, you will get higher open rates, which can raise your email deliverability.
3. Be Noticed By ISPs
Earlier, I mentioned about a small mailing list. You see, subscribers who opted themselves in will most definitely open emails from you, interact with them, and even click the links you placed in them. All of these are a green flag to ISPs. The more your subscribers are opening, interacting, and engaging with your emails, the better you look in the ISPs eyes. If you look good in their eyes, you will be noticed—positively. If they do notice you, you will have a better placement AND better email deliverability.
Final Thoughts:
Email Deliverability is one of your Email Campaign’s bases because no matter how good the content is or how compelling your subject is—if your email deliverability sucks, your efforts of creating that email are wasted because your recipients will not be able to read it.
About The Author:
Hey there, I’m Donnelly. I’m a writer for Scale Up Marketing, living in Singapore. I am a fan of entrepreneurship, technology and marketing strategies. You can visit our CRM Singapore Company website. Scale Up Marketing is a Marketing Automation platform that evolved from CRM and Email Marketing to increase the productivity of the sales force. We are dedicated to helping entrepreneurs succeed by fixing their sales funnel leakages.
