Attention is a limited resource. People only have so much to give, and if your emails don’t have immediate appeal, you can kiss your click-through dreams goodbye.
Recent research shows email open rates dropped in 2020. That trend may reverse, but the number of emails in the world will continue to increase significantly. You don’t just need people opening your emails: you need them receiving, opening, reading, and finding value in them. But where to begin?
Email deliverability is a little more technical than crafting subject lines or choosing copy for a call to action. However, if you want to get the most from your email marketing, your deliverability matters most of all. If your emails never reach the inbox and go to spam instead, you never even get the chance to show off your witty subject lines.
Think of email deliverability as the foundation of your email marketing skyscraper. You can plan for all kinds of fancy trimmings and clever copy, but without a strong foundation, none of it will matter.
If you have never had a problem with your emails reaching inboxes, that’s great. If you have had issues, you already know how frustrating it can be to shout into the digital void. Familiarize yourself with the essentials of deliverability to ensure you never get trapped on the wrong side of a spam filter.
Make sure your email provider has private IPs.
Obtaining a private IP address for your marketing emails is recommended to ensure your messages actually arrive at their destinations. A private IP guarantees that you are the only one sending emails from that address. Without a private IP, you’re sharing the same address with others, which means your reputation as a sender depends on their behavior as much as your own.
What happens if someone sharing your IP is a spammer? It’s not outside the realm of possibility. After all, nearly 85% of all emails are spam, or about 122 billion junk mails each and every day. Your inbox probably isn’t 85% filled with spam, though, which means the filters are doing their jobs. It would be a tragedy to see your own emails counted among that number.
Monitor your sender reputation closely. Most common email tools make it easy to see how you score. With a private IP, at least you know any dips are due to factors you can control.
Get an email service provider with a deliverability team.
Not all email service providers work the same. On one end, you can work with any email provider to send a ton of emails with zero access to help or guidance. On the other, you can work with companies that not only provide tools to ensure good deliverability rates, but also have people who can help you implement strategies to constantly improve it.
You may think something as essential as “professionals with experience in the industry” would be a basic for all email providers. Unfortunately, you would not be correct. Email marketing remains a Wild West of half-baked solutions, so you must be careful with where you place your trust.
Some email marketing platforms like Ontraport take support a step further by providing access to a team of postmasters. Pros like Ontraports postmasters help businesses figure out their technical gaps and bump up their deliverability rates. When you get frustrated staring at numbers and dashboards, it’s nice to be able to ask a real person to unravel the mystery.
Use seed testing.
Seed testing lets you test deliverability before you hit send. You can send emails to test addresses for various inboxes (Gmail, Apple Mail, Outlook, etc.), ISPs, and browsers to see where your emails are getting through to.
Regular seed testing should be an important part of every email marketer’s standard practice. Why build something great without making sure you’ll have an audience on the other end to appreciate it? Keep optimizing your messages and adjusting as necessary to ensure the maximum number of people receive every email.
When you run into a problem with your list, you may need to do some more digging to discover the root of the issue. This is an area where having a postmaster or similar expert can make a major difference. You may need to discover whether people have marked your messages as spam, whether inboxes see your domain as suspicious, or whether something more nefarious is at play.
Nothing feels worse than curating great content and building a brilliant campaign only to discover your emails never reached their intended destinations. Don’t be caught unprepared and undelivered. Use these strategies to optimize your odds of deliverability and give your content the spotlight it deserves.
The post How Email Deliverability Affects Your Business appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.
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