The most economical method of reaching your followers in the digital world is through email marketing. It can be challenging to gain email subscribers and keep a positive reputation with email service providers.
The last thing you want as an email marketer is to experience deliverability problems that could affect or even cause your email program to stop working.
Although nonprofits and charities don’t engage in marketing, ‘every form of outreach, including websites, social media, email, and advertising, is marketing. The most effective channel is email marketing. Your supporters have chosen to receive emails from you, and you can now create messages that speak to them.
Building relationships with your supporters through email marketing. But you need to do more than hit sends to everyone on your list these days. The laws apply.
The deliverability of emails is a significant issue for marketers. We’ll cover the fundamentals of email deliverability in this guide, along with potential problems and solutions.
Email Deliverability: What Is It?
Email deliverability is not a brand-new concept; marketers have been thinking about it for a long time. But lately, you might have noticed that the phrase is used more frequently. This is because it affects an increasing number of organizations as the regulations alter and tighten.
Email deliverability is the likelihood that a subscriber will open your emails. More recipients will be able to see your emails if email deliverability is higher. More supporters will see your messages, act, and/or donate when your email deliverability is good.
How likely you see your emails depends on a few variables. Email deliverability is a common benchmark. The likelihood of the email reaching their primary inbox increases significantly when reaching their primary inbox. Subfolders are typically not checked for spam.
Your email deliverability is impacted by various factors, some of which may also have long-term effects on your email marketing plans.
Marketers have observed that some email service providers (ESPs, but not telepathic ones) are tightening controls on the volume of bulk emails that are permitted to reach subscribers on their network.
The main goal of these guidelines is to ensure that the amount of spam and unwanted emails that can enter a user’s inbox is restricted. When examining email deliverability, the top email service providers of interest include Google and Yahoo (owned by Microsoft).
They have strict guidelines for deliverability and offer various tools to assist marketers in managing it. You’ll probably observe that Gmail is present in a significant (if not dominant) percentage of your email list when reviewing it.
Why Is Email Delivery Important?
Around 3.9 billion people had active email addresses as of the end of 2019. An estimated 293.6 billion emails per day were distributed (sent or received) that same year. At least 4.3 billion active email addresses are anticipated to exist by 2023.
By then, daily email delivery will exceed 347 billion. This implies that within the next three years, at least half of the world’s population will have access to email.
When considering the return on investment for email marketing, things get interesting. For every dollar spent on an email marketing campaign the typical marketer can expect to make up to $42 in profit. That ROI is remarkable.
The issue is that these numbers are of little use to your organization or marketing efforts if the emails you send aren’t received in supporters’ inboxes.
How many of your emails are likely to reach your subscribers’ inboxes is indicated by email deliverability. Low (or poor) email deliverability is the cause of your email not being received.
When you have high email deliverability, ESPs hosting your subscribers’ email accounts trust you. Additionally, more inboxes will receive your campaigns.
What Factors Influence Email Delivery?
After going over what email deliverability is and why it’s essential, it’s time to look at the factors that can influence it. When estimating email deliverability, there are several factors to take into account.
Email Content
The actual content of your email will be our first obvious choice. It can be tempting to concentrate on producing visually appealing email designs and content that will increase click-through rates. Unfortunately, there are other factors you need to think about.
Subscribers anticipate personalized content that addresses them by name and caters to their interests. The ESPs are also present.
Make sure to personalize the email by addressing the subscriber directly. This is crucial in increasing open rates and the likelihood that subscribers will receive the email in their inboxes.
Avoid email content that reads like advertising or is impersonal. Too many images and short text may affect your email’s deliverability.
Concentrate on the email’s subject line because ESPs also check email subject lines for spam and unwanted content. Personalize the topic while avoiding sounding promotional. You might be blocked if it’s determined to be spam. Even worse, you might be marked as spam by supporters.
The Sender IP’s reputation
Sender reputation is a crucial element that influences email deliverability and the likelihood that your message will reach the subscriber’s inbox. It’s more likely that this has to do with the email server you use than it does with you precisely.
The server that sends emails to your subscribers has an assigned IP address. When thinking about the sender’s reputation, you must consider this. Blacklisting that IP address could spell trouble.
A positive working relationship with your eCRM provider is essential in this situation. They can assist in troubleshooting and resolving issues and are probably already monitoring back-end performance in this manner.
Subscriber Behavior
Subscriber behavior is another factor that may impact the deliverability of your emails. ESPs have implemented technologies that track how recipients respond to and behave toward your emails.
Do your supporters actually open your emails, read the content, and click links, or do they just delete them? This lets the ESP know how trustworthy you are and whether or not your subscribers interact with your emails.
Quality Of Email Lists
Email deliverability is influenced by the “health” of your email subscriber list. ESPs frequently consider bounce rates, spam traps, and related problems. Your bounce rate will be higher if your list contains many inactive subscribers.
ISPs use spam traps, which are fictitious emails, to detect spam. These end up on your list due to bulk acquisition campaigns or occasionally because subscribers share unused old emails. Your IP address might be quickly blocked if your list contains spam trap emails.
Finishing It Off
Bravo for investing the time to learn about email deliverability. Check your email program now to see if you adhere to best practices. If not, take action right away to set up monitoring and modify your plan as necessary to ensure good email deliverability.
Take a deep breath and remember that you can recover if you are frightened by a bad sender reputation and poor email deliverability. Create a plan to steer things in the right direction by following the steps outlined in this manual.
