Image: Mariia Shalabaieva on Unsplash
Emails are one of the most successful and authentic sources for marketing and customer outreach. Email marketing revenue was projected to exceed 9.5bn US dollars in 2024, and numerous other datapoints underpin the value of email as a marketing and outreach channel.
If you want to improve your email engagement rates, deliverability is key to achieving your goal.
Here are 8 actionable strategies to do just that.
1. Maintain a clean email list
The most important part of deliverability is having a clean email list. That means your emails should be up to date, relevant to your business, and go to people who have agreed to be on your mailing list.
Emails which are irrelevant, or which recipients have not signed up for have a high chance of being flagged as junk. Further emails from you will likely end up in the junk folder automatically and your email sender reputation will be affected.
For ethical and effective marketing, you should always ensure that people opt in to receiving marketing or other emails from you. In fact, this is a legal requirement in some countries. In addition, your emails should always contain an unsubscribe link, making it easy for people to opt out if they no longer wish to receive your mailings. These steps ensure that your list contains people genuinely interested in your emails, a key factor for better deliverability.
Your email list should be regularly audited and updated to prune users who are inactive or not responding to your mails. You can check beforehand with a quick email warning recipients that their account is due to be deleted and giving them the chance to opt back in.
2. Authenticate your email
Email authentication helps prevent fraudulent activity by verifying the identity of the sender. It improves deliverability because it signals to the mailbox provider that the sender is legitimate, and protects against malicious actions such as spoofing and phishing.
Properly configured email authentication protocols such as:
- SPF (Sender Policy Framework)
- DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail)
- DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance)
help verify your identity as sender and establish trust with providers and recipients by proving the mails are legitimately sent from your domain. It protects your domain reputation and ensures people can confidently trust emails they receive from your domain.
Learn more about how to set up email authentication here.
3. Monitor your sender reputation
Your email sender reputation is a measure of trustworthiness, a bit like a credit score. ISPs (internet service providers) and mailbox providers use it to decide whether to deliver your message or send it straight to spam.
Keep an eye on your spam complaint rate (the percentage of emails users flag as spam), bounce rate (the percentage of emails that are not delivered), and domain/IP reputation (as measured by programs such as SenderScore or Google Postmaster) to make sure you are maintaining a positive sender reputation.
If you have a high bounce or spam complaint rate it might mean you need to audit your email list, or review the content and frequency of your emails.
Read more about sender reputation here.
4. Ensure high quality content and design
Deliverability is directly impacted by the quality of your email. This goes for both the content and the design.
Valuable, relevant and engaging content, delivered in the form of emails which are attractive and easy to read or interact with, improves engagement. This will increase audience loyalty and engagement, and positively impact your sender reputation and deliverability.
Poorly written or irrelevant content, with annoying or unnatractive design features, will likely lead to unsubscribes or spam flags.
Key design points to follow include:
- Readability and clarity: Your email should be well organised with a coherent visual hierarchy to break up the text and highlight key points, and whitespace to prevent overcrowding and make the content easier to scan.
- Mobile-friendliness: Ensure your emails function correctly on a variety of devices and screen sizes.
- Clear call to action (CTA): Make your CTAs stand out visually in a prominent position, with a clear and concise message for the desired action.
- Engaging visuals: High quality, well positioned visuals enhance the reader’s experience and reinforce your message. Aim for a good balance between images and text.
- Personalization: Personalize your emails where possible, using the recipient’s name and making product or content recommendations based on previous exchanges.
You should also follow good accessibility practice to ensure you don’t exclude any part of your audience. Key elements include alt text for images, a good colour contrast for readability and links which are clearly visible. For a more detailed guide see the Web Accessibility Initiative’s Guide.
5. Avoid common spam triggers
ISPs and mailbox providers use filters to catch spammy emails. Your email may appear to be spam if it contains too many of the following:
- ALL CAPS
- Exclamation marks!
- Special characters such as &$
Emails with a high image-to-text ratio can also trigger a filter as they may appear spammy and difficult to read. You should aim for a good balance between text and images. Make sure you use high quality, optimized images which load quickly, and include alt text.
Remember to test your email before you click “send”. Use a free programme such as MailTester to run a spam test and check your email for red flags. Testing gives you a chance to fix any problems, increasing the likelihood your email will reach inboxes.
6. Optimize timing and frequency
Deliverability is more affected by the frequency and timeliness of your emails than you may realize. You might come across as spammy if you send too many emails too soon or, conversely, too infrequently.
Maintaining a regular schedule helps to enhance the way your recipients and ISPs view your emails.
- Create a consistent sending schedule based on the times when your audience is most engaged and active.
- Monitor your open rates to see where you have the best results and plan your efforts around these specific days and times.
A/B testing will help you establish which times and frequencies elicit the best response from your audience.
7. Encourage engagement with interactive emails
Deliverability can be increased by encouraging readers to engage with your emails by clicking, responding, or sharing. ISPs assess the value of your emails by looking for interaction indicators. Having engaged readers tells providers that your audience finds your emails valuable and worth their time.
You can use some straightforward actions to prompt reader engagement such as:
- Surveys
- Quizzes
- Feedback requests
- Incentives and promotions
When readers are actively interacting with your content, these minor details can not only improve deliverability, they can also foster better relationships with your audience.
Re-engage dormant subscribers by sending a warm follow-up. This also provides you with the opportunity to remove them if they are no longer interested, keeping your list active and tight.
8. Regularly test and optimize
As with many things, deliverability is not a one-off; it’s a continuous and ongoing process. To make sure your emails keep successfully reaching inboxes, you need to test and optimize them frequently.
Use A/B testing to assess different subject lines, sender names, or content styles. This will help you focus on the best strategies and content which will appeal to and engage your audience the most.
Keep track of your click-through and open rates to determine the most effective email formats and content. Strong reporting features provided by platforms such as Google Analytics and Mailchimp help you make data-driven decisions by providing insights into campaign performance.
Conclusion
Any successful email marketing plan has to include a continuing focus on improving email deliverability. Ensure your emails arrive in your audience’s inbox by concentrating on list sanitation, authentication, reputation monitoring, content quality, and testing.
By continuously improving your strategy in this area, you can ensure your emails remain in touch with changing user behavior and compliant with provider rules, improving customer relations and yielding better outcomes for your marketing.
